


Devil Riding Shotgun

by sebviathan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A lot of sex, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, early resolve of ust, lack of empathy, mental issues, mentions of extreme violence, mentions of hardcore drug use, story NOT about the ust, the destiel is actually very minor, unexpected ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-14 05:10:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 86,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sebviathan/pseuds/sebviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College!AU: Sam recently left rehab for his drug issues with Ruby, and though he's recovering, those issues still haven't quite left him. And really, they might have just been there from the start. His decision to avoid relationships for now dissolves when he meets Luc - it's short for Lucifer. He keeps Sam grounded, but not necessarily in a healthy way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drawn in by smoke and rough edges

_ _

 

(art by me)

 

 _This is a new start,_  Sam told himself when he first began the term at his new college.  _It's a start, and that's what I need._

It wasn't Stanford, though. That was the main thing irking him. Although if he had been in this situation four years ago when he  _should_  have been first going to college, it would be doing far more than irking him. If his options had suddenly shrunk from Ivy League to state universities back then, when his ambition had been at its peak, Sam would likely have gone insane. And hell, it might have driven him to do what got him in the position he was currently in, anyway.

All throughout high school, it had been a dream to go study law at Stanford. He was one of those rare few at genius level—and then in the rare fewer at genius level who also had enough street smarts to know how to not stress himself to death and thus get the right opportunities. And of course, with his family's financial situation (or lack of one at all, really), it was easier to get in. Everyone always jumped to help the poor kid.

But Sam supposed he could pinpoint the moment that all those dreams of success had quite literally been shattered: with the loss of his high school girlfriend, Jess. Academics may have been extremely important to him, but Jess had been his life. He'd loved her, and she'd been the only thing he cared about more than his own life. And then a freaking house-fire had taken that away, just like it had taken away his mother before he was old enough to remember.

That had simply been too much. Sam theoretically  _could_  have continued on to Stanford and turned off his grieving long enough to study—but he actually had emotions, and strong ones at that, and so he simply couldn't. The only good thing for him had been to get away, to put law school on hold and go away for a while. And so he'd taken a road trip with his brother, Dean.

Things had gone relatively well for a while. He'd met some girls, started to move on. But they were all one-night stands or weekend-long girlfriends, not really that much attachment involved. Until he'd met Ruby, who didn't turn out to be what she'd seemed at first.

She was poisonous. Sam still didn't know how he'd ever managed to be lured in—perhaps he was attracted to danger like that all along, and it was only then that he could express it? Regardless, he'd let her poison him. He had let her shoot him up, fully aware that she had become less of a girlfriend and more of a dealer with benefits. And man, did she  _shoot him up_. Right before sex, too. It had become just  _so_  addicting—he'd  _known_  he was hurting himself while he was doing it. He'd think,  _This is wrong, what would Dean think of me, I'm not this kind of person,_  right as he was sticking the needle in his vein.

Now, Sam remembered back to those nights in dark, dingy motels and sometimes even warehouses, evil in the dust and dark all around them, and evil in Ruby's eyes and her very being—and then himself, despite everything he'd ever been taught, accepting it willingly. He'd seen it in front of him, recognized it, and still let it all happen. Several times. And he'd think after every time he slept with Ruby that his body would be fucked up in the future. He'd lazily think it, which a sense of indifference, and then fall asleep.

It had taken a huge slap from reality across the face to make Sam realize that he really had to pull the plug on everything he had with Ruby. No more drugs, no more sex, no more mind games. And it had taken Dean, as well as extra help from his brother's boyfriend, Cas. The addiction had become so consuming that only his brother's harsh words and harsher punches had been able to drag him out of the mindset.

Truth was, it had partially been Ruby dying from overdose, weeks after Dean discovered everything and held an intervention, that kept him from going to her any longer. If she had lived, he wouldn't have been surprised at himself for craving it all over again. But luckily she hadn't, and Dean had sent him off to rehab for a year. Rehab had been good for him—he'd regained his sanity, overcome the addiction, and gotten over all the health complications. Well, he'd gotten over them for the most part. Though he still didn't sleep for several days straight sometimes.

Once he'd gotten out of that place, Sam had finally had an opportunity to get his life around. There was no roadtrip to continue—Dean was living with Cas, now. They'd let Sam live with them just long enough to get back on his feet, get a job, go to college.

But when he'd looked for readmissions, he'd discovered (well, he'd guessed beforehand, so— _officially confirmed_ ) that his history with hard drugs had made him ineligible for Stanford or any other big-deal colleges. And that was what had led him here, to Kansas University. It wasn't bad—it was just average. Sam Winchester didn't like to be considered average; though he supposed what with all the drug issues, he was on an even playing field now.

Besides, Stanford was a mere disappointment in the past and wasn't his dream anymore.

Right now, Sam's dream was to just have a normal life, after everything that he'd gone through. Average wasn't too bad—really, it was a good start.

Although walking past all these people made Sam start to feel self-conscious, as though all the drugs and other horrible things that he'd done were plain as day, the outer layers of his skin and clothes transparent to show everything underneath. He felt like he was just his past walking around. And then he stepped inside his Law & Criminology classroom and felt grounded, and suddenly it was easier to see that any prolonged stares directed at him were due to his height. After all, he was practically the size of the door.

The discomfort in his stomach gradually dissipated as he waited for the professor to begin the class, and as reality took true hold of everything, Sam felt that he had a grip on things. It was so much easier to feel separated from the life he used to live when he focused on the board, the professor, and his notes. There were no vague voices in his head or jittering feelings in his arm. It felt so refreshing to have control again.

In spite of the drugs he'd taken between then and now, Sam still even remembered quite a few law terms. Enough that he was able to answer a great deal of the professor's "Let's just see what you know so far" questions and impress half of the class—and make the other half jealous. He already heard a couple people muttering " _class genius_ " under their breath, and the epithet made him feel like he was back in high school again, like nothing had ever happened. Being admired on some level was rather important to him.

"I see you've already studied up, Mr. Winchester," said Professor Mills after Sam raised his hand briefly and answered for the sixth time, smiling and just as impressed as the rest. "Do you really even need this class?" There was a soft laugh of assent across the classroom as well as a bit of a collective groan from those who were likely jealous.

And now he was on the spotlight. Sam liked attention, but not necessarily this much—he could handle it, though. "Well, I studied a lot of Law in high school, but I still need this class to major in it."

Sam's confidence seemed to make him even more of the class star, for he noticed that a couple girls in the classroom were hiding smiles under their hands and glancing to him now.

"Fair enough," Professor Mills said, and she resumed going over the basics with everyone else.

When the class ended two and a half hours later, those girls were still staring and smiling, and all Sam could do was smile back. He didn't know if pursuing a romantic relationship would be good for him at the moment—it seemed like a good idea just to stay single and dependent only on himself and his grades for a while, just as his therapists in rehab had said. If he wanted to live as normally as possible, he needed to keep from becoming even slightly bent to the will of anyone who wasn't a legitimate authority. Even the shyest girl possible would indirectly impose on him to adhere to her needs, and Sam didn't want to subject himself to control that wasn't his own, nor did he want anyone else to have to deal with him. He couldn't unleash his inner demons on anyone else when he was still dealing with them himself.

But a friend… just a normal friend would be nice. So far his roommate, Adam Milligan, seemed like a good guy, but perhaps he could find a friend who was actually in one of his classes.

As though drawn in by Sam's thought, he felt a tap on the back of his arm as he walked out of the classroom and turned around to see one of the boys who had sat near him. He was a bit on the chubby side but looked all-around friendly and like the sort of person he'd have hung around in high school. In fact, Sam might have guessed by his face that the boy was still in high school.

"Hey—for real, man, why do you know so much about Law already?" he asked conversationally and with a hint of real curiosity. "You sound like you've taken this exact course before. And judging by your age, I'd say you did."

Okay, not so conversationally and more real curiosity. Sam almost started panicking, as he felt that someone was getting to know who he really was already. He certainly wasn't going to tell this guy any more than he felt the need to. So he gripped his backpack more tightly and glanced over to him.

"Yeah, I did take a couple years of Law before," he finally told the guy. "But several credits don't really count for me anymore for personal reasons, so I have to re-take a lot of shit."

Apparently satisfied with that answer, the guy simply nodded and returned his gaze to the ground, not planning on asking him more personal questions—for which Sam was glad. But then he quickly looked up, as though remembering something, and then turning and stopping to hold his hand out and say, "I'm Gary. And—your name's…?"

"Sam," he told him, grasping Gary's hand and shaking it firmly. When he let go, the younger boy grimaced and had to shake his hand out, which made Sam smirk in amusement that his handshakes could still do that. And, well, that it looked like he was making a friend. As they continued walking, it occurred to him—"Hey, how could you tell that I was older? Is it really that obvious?"

Gary just shrugged. "You look too worn to be someone who just got out of high school, I guess."

With that, Sam told Gary that he was going to head out to the cafeteria, and on the way, he tried to keep that sinking feeling of his own transparency take over.

* * *

The non-incident with Gary was forgotten as Sam proceeded to have what felt at first like it was going to be very good first day of term. When he took his seat to eat in the hour he had before his next class, several girls seemed keen to sit near him, and though his interest in any of them was restrained and not necessarily romantic (though one of them reminded him a little of Jess, and he told himself that perhaps she would be worth going after once he'd sorted his own head out), he felt relaxed and like he  _didn't_  have sixteen bats in the belfry.

Sane human interaction was good. It was development. His rehab therapists would be proud.

But Sam still felt a sort of separation from the rest of the room as the girls talked to him and he talked back, as though he wasn't entirely there. His body and his mind functioned fine, and none of the girls were tipped off that he wasn't all there, but he felt a foot or two above his physical body. This had been a problem way back when after Ruby died and he'd first been admitted into the rehabilitation center—he'd had to tether his mind to his body sometimes, to keep it from floating away entirely.

It wasn't that Sam was suddenly itching for another fix or going through withdrawal after all this time, but rather that he was in a somewhat unfamiliar situation and he supposed it was difficult not to drift away with his scarred state of mind. He couldn't remember the last time he'd held a normal conversation with more than two normal people at once.

"I really like the long-hair look," the one who reminded him of Jess said with a laugh, gesturing like she really wanted to touch it. Sam was used to it—a lot of girls did. "Most guys grow out their hair and either look like a fedora-douchebag or Jesus, but you actually pull it off."

"You do kind of look like Jesus, though," her friend giggled, and Sam fought the urge to laugh out loud and tell them how  _wrong_  they were. Sure, he was better now, but he was significantly closer to being the Devil than the son of God.

When his awkward smile twitched and faltered, the girl looked alarmed and said, "Oh—sorry, are you religious? I didn't mean to be offensive, I just—"

"No, it's fine," he reassured her, briefly hiding his expression under a sip of the coke he'd gotten from a vending machine. "I'm really not. I mean—I believe in a higher power and everything, I just don't… worship it, I guess."

With that, he only felt more awkward and sunk slightly into his seat. His religious beliefs weren't relevant to the conversation and yet he'd gone and explained them like he wanted attention or something, just like he'd always ended up doing even in high school—"

"Oh, cool—me too, pretty much." The one who reminded him of Jess smiled and leaned forward over the table, and Sam recognized it as a subtle flirting tactic. "I always explain it that it's like how I believe in unicorns, but that doesn't mean I worship them."

Sam let out a genuine laugh at that, and it felt nice. But with the warmness that bubbled up in his chest, rather than feeling more grounded, it was as though he felt himself get pulled back to the ground for one moment before being let go and drifting away again. He couldn't get the rope out far enough to tether himself and draw himself back again before the girls got up and left to go to one of their classes.

Once they were gone, Sam inhaled like it was his first breath in several minutes, and he was on the ground again. He looked down and saw a slip of paper slightly tucked under his lunch tray, which turned out to be a phone number.

On the top read "Amelia"—Now  _the one who reminded him of Jess_  had a name. The paper felt crisp in his hand, the means to two very different futures in mind, and something he hadn't seen in a long time. Not just the phone number itself, but the symbol of interest and the potential of a relationship.

There had been a pale sense of affection between them moments before, and Sam had even looked forward to getting to know her. But now that this girl who reminded him—only vaguely, now that he thought about it—of Jess and whom he'd only met less than an hour ago had left him a definite means to pursue that… he couldn't feel sure of anything. The whole conversation just felt stale now.

It was his past talking, he was sure. It was whatever was left of the drugs—not the chemicals, obviously, since those were all gone—no, nothing physical. But all the baggage that stuff had left behind in his brain and all the memories with Ruby and his old life, that year on the road… yeah, it was all that. Sam knew it, and he knew he could never get rid of that part of his life permanently. It wasn't good, and he knew he should have been trying to block it out, but it would always be there.

He stared at the phone number that suddenly held a heavy weight in his hands, a very clear  _yes_  or  _no_  ringing out in his mind.  _Trash it or slip it into your pocket to save for the day that you feel mentally healthy enough to not be a burden to anyone._

The part of him that was still grounded made him check his phone for the time, and in his rush to the next class that he had forgotten began in fifteen minutes, he barely even thought as he balled up the paper between three fingers and tossed it in the trashcan. As he left the cafeteria, Amelia seemed to fade until she wasn't even a name in his mind anymore, but rather  _the one who actually wasn't like Jess at all_ , now that he thought about it even more.

* * *

Lessons kept him grounded, it seemed. Individual people, however, didn't necessarily. Or at least not ones who held romantic interest in him. Because Sam did just fine with his English 101 class and speaking to the professor as well as other students, and he only felt like briefly slipping away once or twice.

The only sense of his old normality he couldn't hold was anything to do with relationships. The mere idea of it scared him—of what he might do to the other person, and what he might do to himself. That was why he needed to remain disinterested. As if he really needed to control that anymore.

There was only a half-hour break in between English 101 and his last lesson of the day, and Sam decided to use that time to just head straight to the class. It would take him over ten minutes anyway, considering the size of the university, and he didn't really have much to do with his time so far. No real friends to mill about with yet. He tried to think of whether or not he even really wanted that and couldn't come up with an answer.

Frankly, Sam decided as he took a seat on one of the higher tiers of the Greek Mythology classroom, today had actually been more peaceful than expected. It felt remarkably normal compared to what could have happened; and he would know, since he'd spent the night before uncontrollably envisioning all the worst-case scenarios. And  _normal_ , as he'd thought many times so far today, was what he wanted, now. So important that he nearly scribbled that on the right-hand corner of his paper rather than his name, which he habitually wrote on every paper he used for anything school-related. That was something he was taught in middle school and never ended up forgetting. It was one of those small things that would stick with him forever despite it not  _really_  mattering anymore.

Sam remembered how he'd get shit simply for being the sort of student to write his name on everything. Once in high school, when things got difficult and people around him really began slacking off, it was suddenly  _socially unacceptable_  to care about your grades enough to put your name on everything. He'd actually forgotten if it had been like that the first time he went to college, too. So he didn't know if people still cared. It was a stupid, small thing to worry about, but he wasn't even worrying. It was just dumb curiosity over something that didn't even matter more than to remind him of the time before his life had gone to shit.

In his musings over the social implications behind involuntarily writing your name on every paper you wrote on, Sam almost didn't notice someone sit right next to him and shortly glance to smile in slight greeting to him. At once, his eyes scanned the room to see it was full. Barely—there were only about three others so far.

"There are plenty of other spaces to sit," said Sam, feeling as though his voice wasn't under his own control. He hadn't meant to say that—he wouldn't want to sound rude, but it just annoyed him when something like this happened. But before he could apologize, the other man simply leaned back and smiled, his eyes dark and his soul behind them looking bruised, and shrugged.

"I like this seat," he explained, looking amused at the question. His voice came out more demanding than Sam expected.

"Oh." Fair enough. Sam's eyes raked over the man's hair which wasn't all that different than Dean's besides that it was blonde and then flicked back to his face. "How many years have you been at KU?"

"This is my first day." The man spoke like he was taking a low drag of a cigarette as he talked, and even as he frowned in confusion, Sam felt himself physically drawn in just  _slightly_ , as though to the smoke that wasn't even there.

"Then… how do you know that you like this seat?" he asked slowly.

"Because you're sitting in the one next to it."

It was almost more of a question, with how the guy shrugged again. But then he winked and bent down to rummage through his bag for paper. And Sam couldn't tell for the life of him whether that was real flirting or a joke, so he just stared. His confusion boiled down until he was pretty much checking the guy out, actually thinking of him as a valid option in spite of his promise to himself to stay out of a relationship. Sam had never fancied himself attracted to guys, nor had he ever really experimented, but he wasn't afraid of the possibility of it. He wasn't going to have a huge sexuality crisis like his brother had.

If Sam was told to describe the way this guy looked, he would have said  _smoke and rough edges_. His facial structure wasn't as strong as that normally would have implied, but he simply just seemed rough. His stubble was slight, like it was smoke grazing the bottom of his face. And when he sat back up and looked at Sam again, a smirk twitching on his lips, he noticed the fluidity with which his expression changed and how everything seemed simultaneously natural and deliberate.

It might not have been flirting—maybe the guy was just messing with him. Sam didn't want to get his hopes up. But in the next second he remembered that he wasn't even supposed to be pursuing this sort of thing in the first place.

 _I'm not pursuing it, though,_  part of him thought—an old, wicked part that he'd thought he'd stowed away back when he'd quit the drugs.  _It came to me._

_Shut up, you don't even know the guy's name._

As though the part of him that seemed to be an escaped convict from the confines of his past had willed it, it was right then that Sam noticed the other man scribbling his name down in the corner of his paper. Just like he had done, minutes ago. He briefly forgot all about the possible flirtation and was simply amused that this man still had the same habit, even after high school, like him.

And then the man noticed him noticing, and Sam felt he needed to say something to make it less awkward—though it didn't seem any less like he had just been looking at this other guy's paper and reading his name.

"So— _Luc_ , is that French?" he wondered, actually somewhat interested. The last name  _Morgan_  seemed kind of French, too, so he figured.

"No, it's short for Lucifer," the other man said indifferently, though quirking his eyebrow and smirking slightly, "so I guess you could say it's Latin." His look didn't so much dare Sam to say  _"And Satanic,"_  but rather said that he hoped Sam was impressed.

"Woah—uh, so, did your parents purposely name you after Satan, or…?"

"Or were they just oblivious?" Luc laughed, and there was something about it that threw Sam off—it wasn't that the laugh didn't reach his eyes, but that the laugh  _did_  reach his eyes. He hadn't expected it to, what with the dullness that had been in the man's eyes before. "Nah, my mom knew. She was raised religious, even. I guess it was a sort of a rebellion thing, to be a little Satanist and not like her parents. S'not like there's a law against it…. Granted, she was sixteen, and sixteen year-olds tend to be stupid."

It was surprising how willing Luc was to share all that with him, only having just met him—surprising until Sam found himself completely willing to tell him personal things as well. Like there was already no wall between them. And then he almost tried to tug himself back to the ground when he realized he wasn't even floating away at all.

"I guess it's still a pretty cool name, though," Sam offered, a laugh that was more like a brief exhale reaching the air as he spoke. "Must freak most people out when you tell them."

At that, Luc grinned and his eyes darted to the left, as though he was remembering. "My elementary school years were great. All the kids with religious parents weren't allowed to be my friend—seriously, some of them  _actually_  thought I was the Devil. Teachers insisted I go by my middle name, Nick…. And a lot of them ended up calling my mom just to see what my home life was like—I guess they assumed anyone who named their child after Satan couldn't be a good parent."

He stopped there and stared at the desk, his eyes looking as though they had come to a point in the memories that he couldn't go past. Like the record was stuck.

Sam recognized that look as one of pensive sadness and figured he should leave it alone, but still ended up shifting himself in his seat and asking, "Was she?"

Luc sighed, but didn't seem all that reluctant to answer—for which Sam was relieved. "Not really. She did a lot of drugs and died of overdose when I was a teenager."

His face read apathetic at first, but then he looked to Sam with dull eyes again and raised both eyebrows, his eyes suddenly boring into Sam's like he  _knew_. Like he knew that Sam had a past with drugs and right now he was remembering a dealer/girlfriend/whatever-she'd-been dying of overdose. He wasn't going to acknowledge it out loud. It wasn't even as though he felt uncomfortable sharing that (despite the fact he'd only just met the guy), but rather that he didn't feel it needed to be said.

"So, uh, how did you get on without your mom? Fostercare, or—?"

"Nah, just lived on my own. Wasn't that hard." Luc's voice had its original quality back, which for some reason had Sam relieved. Though he nodded sympathetically, understanding what it was like to pretty much be all on your own. Both of his parents were dead, and Dean was hundreds of miles away with his husband. All of his old friends wanted nothing to do with him anymore.

By then the classroom was pretty much full, and it wasn't long until the professor walked in and wrote his name on the board to start the lesson. It gave Sam an excuse to not carry on with the same conversation and instead just steal glances at Luc while still paying attention to what the professor was saying.

From the exact side, Luc looked peaceful and fairly normal. But with a tilt of his head and a slight mussing up of his hair, he looked like he could be an escaped convict. And  _God_ , every time he ran a hand through his hair, Sam had to look away for fear of staring for too long or reaching forward himself. And then his peripheral vision would catch Luc's slight turn of head to notice him noticing, and Sam knew that he knew.

 _Smoke and rough edges_ , Sam thought, confirming his earlier impression to himself. It made Luc's face dynamic. And it made Sam want to stare.

It was such a consuming urge that it overrode the surprise he should have felt that he was attracted to a man, that he was actually attracted to  _anyone_  right now—and that he felt perfectly intact and not at all like he was floating away. He could barely even remember what that had felt like earlier with  _the one who sort of reminded him of Jess but then didn't_. He was grounded every time Luc said anything to him and he felt like he always had been.

Luc would lean to the left and mutter a clever comment about what the professor was saying, and Sam would feel like grinning and letting out a single, loud laugh. But he contained it for the sake of not drawing attention to himself and instead simply let out more breath than usual as a silent giggle.

The class had nearly passed entirely when he felt Luc's fingers lightly tap on his forearm. Before anything else, it made Sam's muscles seize up as though those fingers had injected something into him. And he was fairly sure that it was noticeable, considering how large his muscles were and how easily his sleeves got tight when they strained, but he turned to look at Luc as though he hadn't reacted strangely at all, ignoring the look of recognition in the man's eyes.

He was pointing to the other end of their tier of desks, where a guy was practically all the way hunched over his desk, sleeping, and very obviously drooling. When Sam saw, he snickered, and Lucifer's wicked gaze caught him like a trap.

"And on the first day, too. I'm gonna take a picture," he said, pulling out his phone. Sam was briefly reminded of high school and felt that sense of old normality for a second.

"D'you think we should wake him up?" Sam suggested. "He looks pretty out of it."

"Nah—what you do in this situation is let everyone leave the room and turn the lights off, so when he wakes up he'll think he slept all day and no one's on the campus anymore."

While Sam was generally more of a decent person than that, the idea made him laugh again, his expression matching Luc's. Something twisted in his brain, and he could practically  _feel_  his view on the matter being genuinely changed—if Luc thought it was funny, then yeah, it was definitely funny. That guy deserved it for sleeping in class, not to mention so ridiculously.

There was something about the way Luc looked at him then that got Sam nearly reeling. He'd noticed, throughout the couple hours of the Greek Mythology lesson, that there was a difference between what he felt when Luc talked to him and when he'd impressed everyone in his Law class earlier. Hours ago, he'd felt like he weighed enough to safely stay on the ground, like he didn't have to pull himself back. Now, he felt as though Luc had grabbed him by a rope that was fused to his chest and pulled him down forcibly. He still didn't feel he weighed enough, but it wasn't Sam tying himself down. It was Luc.

Lucifer had control of whether he stayed on the ground or not. And he could tug him along everywhere.

 _But really,_  finally thought Sam as he and everyone else (but for the guy who was still asleep) left the classroom,  _why for a guy I just met?_ And then he wondered why it had only just occurred to him, and he was silently answered by the vague awareness of the hold that Luc's eyes alone had on him, the way a simple touch had made him feel.

"See you Thursday," was all Sam thought to say as they parted ways outside the classroom, lighting hitting his arm as he did.

He was answered with a smile that stood out sharply on Luc's face and shimmered in his eyes before he turned around and Sam could only see the back of his head.


	2. Being an ex-druggie is pretty metal

Despite the fact that nothing legitimately bad actually happened, Sam went on to have quite a bitch of a week.

He had hoped that perhaps Lucifer would be in one of his other classes or even take the same route in the hallways long enough to see him, but over the next couple days, he didn't see him at all. Not even at any of the campus-run stores or in the cafeteria or outside during any break time he had.

Sam would have taken a walk around the men's dormitories or asked around to see if he could find where Luc was, but the moment his mindset began drifting there, he had to figuratively (and sometimes literally) splash his face with cold water. It was one think to seek him out in a room full of people where any of them could easily be him, and another thing to actively go and look for him. He was on recovery—he couldn't do this to himself yet.

Two fucking days and he was already finding himself actually looking forward to the next Greek Mythology lesson just so he could see Luc and talk to him again. It was just two days, and he already felt things similar to that of withdrawal. Although it wasn't that hard to distinguish exactly what about Luc he was having withdrawal from—nothing else pulled him to the ground like that. In fact, Sam couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like that.

But yeah, no, even in a totally non-drug sense, that was unhealthy and Sam couldn't let that happen. This wasn't going to help his case.

Gary decided to sit next to him in Law now, though, so Sam supposed they were friends now and was glad for it. He was a solid guy to have a friend in, and while probably equal in intelligence, he clearly looked up to Sam, so he felt satisfied with everything around him when he was in Law. He assumed it was going to be a single-class friendship, though, since Gary had a class when he had lunch and he didn't see him at any other time, it seemed. Maybe he could invite the guy out for drinks someday or something.

It also turned out that Adam was in his Biochemistry class, so that made it pretty much obligatory that they become friends—they shared a class that met three times a week as well as a room, so there was no questioning that they manage to get along and know each other. And with more time to talk to him, Sam saw that the guy was slightly less smug than what he'd come off as before (not that that was all that much of a bad thing) and was actually pretty intelligent.

"See, if I didn't care about having the reputation of someone smart enough to take this kind of science, I wouldn't be in here," Adam was saying on Wednesday afternoon, leaning his face into his hand, propped up by his elbow on his desk. "Can't I just go to my Auto class already?"

Like a bird of prey sniffing out a meal, Sam nearly broke his neck through whiplash as he turned his head. "I didn't know you were interested in Auto."

"Yeah, I wanted to know how to fix cars ever since I was a little kid—why?"

"I—my dad was a part-time mechanic and taught my brother and I everything he knew about cars. I would take the class but I never really wanted to follow in his footsteps, and I don't need it, anyway."

Adam grinned and shook his head slightly, like he should have figured. "Man, it's like we're long-lost brothers or something."

For several minutes at a time it would feel as though Gary and Adam and Amelia and her friends who continued to sit with him during lunch, as well as the rest of his now-normal life, were enough for Sam. But then once Adam stopped talking or a lesson ended, it was back to feeling somewhat distant from his own body and a general sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction with everything. Not quite depression, but just like he was missing something that he needed. Sam knew exactly what it was, but he didn't want to acknowledge it.

Despite the fact that Amelia was one of the main causes of Sam's lapses of sense of detachment, it was still nice to have her company while he ate. Now that he had it set in the stone of his heart that he would only ever be interested in her as a friend, it was easier for him to remain on the ground while talking to her. He could see it on her face when she greeted him, though—he hadn't called her. She was probably holding out for him, maybe thinking that Sam might just be nervous or waiting for the right time. She was probably going to settle into that comfortable "He'll call me pretty soon" assumption for about a week and then move on and figure he just wasn't interested.

He just hoped that he wasn't leading her on by continuing to talk to her like they were good friends, and that she wouldn't be so disappointed that she just stopped talking to him. It didn't really seem like she was only pursuing a friendship with the intention of later getting into his pants—though you could never really tell with people. Still, Amelia seemed like the kind of person who would still be content with friendship if sex didn't happen.

"So—that scar," she said to break a short silence on Thursday afternoon, pointing to a pencil-thick white line on Sam's upper arm. "How'd you get it?"

She sipped her bottle of Dr. Pepper through a straw (a quirk of hers that Sam easily noticed, which he might have found endearing if he was interested in her) and looked at him eagerly, the glisten in her eyes expecting some fantastic story, like him having been to war or fought a lion or something. Sam supposed she might have been wondering about him being so muscled but not involved in sports, and possibly the fact that he looked older than a college freshman should have—and war would have been a good explanation. It wasn't anywhere close to the reason for that scar, though.

No one had asked about it since rehab. One night when Ruby was God-knows-where and Sam needed a hit, he'd tried to shoot himself up and fell down in the process, dragging the needle too far in and jaggedly up his arm. It wasn't so much of a scar as it was a rip in his skin that just should never have happened.

But Sam glanced to it as though he'd forgotten about it and raised his eyebrows casually. Sorry, no war stories today. "I fell off a tree when I was seven," he lied easily. "Hit a branch on my way down and it made a pretty nasty cut."

It briefly occurred to him that from an extremely metaphorical perspective, what he'd said wasn't all that far off. He made a mental note to use that in an English essay someday.

Amelia seemed to accept that answer with slight disappointment. Sam would never have really guessed that she had any sort of feeling that he was lying, though, because who would even lie about that? She had no reason to believe he had something more going on.

"That's pretty fuckin' metal," said one of her friends, whose name Sam had learned was Lily, and everyone at the table laughed. Sam only laughed because he imagined how much more metal it would have seemed if he was willing to tell them that he got the scar from a heroin needle.

As much as he'd been looking forward to seeing Luc again for the last two days, Sam kept his cool and greeted him normally that afternoon, as though it was no big deal.

His lungs suddenly felt significantly fuller, though, and there was no way to brush that off as anything but pure relief that he could talk to Luc again. There was nothing quite like the way he felt when he looked at him—though Sam did recognize the feeling somehow. He just couldn't pinpoint when he'd last felt it or why.

"So," Luc said when he sat down, and it felt at that moment as though no time had passed in between the last Greek Mythology lesson. Sam had inhaled three days ago and was finally exhaling now. "Did you do the reading?"

"Yeah—well, kind of. I skimmed it. I already know most of the whole background with Zeus anyway," he added without thinking other than that he wanted to impress Luc.

A few moments of silence passed smoothly through them before Luc inched a bit toward him and said, "This isn't your first time in college, is it." It wasn't a question, but much more of a statement. The way he folded his arms and the certainty that lit up his dull eyes made it obvious how well he could read Sam, how much he enjoyed reading Sam. Like he was finding pieces of him that no one else could. The fact that that was so satisfying to him made Sam feel more wanted than he had been in a while.

But he still paused, caught in the middle of a decision. It wasn't between telling him the whole truth or not, but when he should tell him.

"No—I, uh… it's not," he admitted, briefly looking away and deciding to pull out his notebook to have time to think before looking at him again. Luc didn't need to ask directly—the slight twitch in his eyebrow was enough of a What happened? and so Sam could directly answer in a slightly lower octave: "I'll tell you about it sometime."

That implied Just not here, where there's other people around, which implied that he intended to interact with Luc outside of class at some point. Realization of that didn't seem to fly over Luc's head in the least bit, as he responded with a smile more genuine and innocent than any he'd given yet.

"I'm looking forward to it," he said, and he might as well have winked right before he turned his attention to the professor and the lesson.

As far as Sam saw it, the line was drawn. They'd passed into open flirting, and hell, he'd practically implied a date between them. Without really intending to, he'd really begun pursuing a relationship.

So much for remaining disinterested.

It wasn't as though he was seeking a relationship with just anyone, though. He had simply met someone and happened to become attracted to them—for no solid reason he could figure out, though. Actually, he saw it more like he'd been minding his own business when someone walked in and waved something that smelled really good under his nose. Of course he was going to follow the temptation.

See, temptation is all he is. You can't let that get to your head. You can't end up dependent on anyone else.

Lucifer was something that helped him, though. Lucifer made him feel grounded. He was something good to be dependent on.

You're not fit for a relationship. You hurt everything you touch. You're not worthy.

Lucifer didn't seem to think so—and if he did, he didn't care.

You haven't even known him for a week.

Then he'd get to know him.

He's a man.

So what?

You're not even fully recovered yet. You might as well still be with Ruby.

Ruby was gone. She was far back in his past and six feet underground.

He doesn't even know the real you.

That was why Sam was going to tell him everything. Lucifer wanted to know him and already seemed to have a feeling about what he was going to hear.

Doesn't it seem kind of odd that he would be okay with the things you've done? What kind of person lives through their mother dying of overdose and then goes on to be with someone like you? What kind of person would even want to be with you, regardless?

Well, he figured that he had no choice but the sort of person who would choose him in spite of the drugs. Otherwise he'd never have anyone.

You probably just should never be with anyone. Some people are meant to be alone because there's no one they could be with that would make a stable relationship, and you're one of them, Sam.

Maybe he didn't care whether it was stable or not.

One of the ways the drugs and his relationship with Ruby had affected him was giving him a voice in his head. But unlike what you would think, it wasn't similar to a schizophrenia-sort of deal—his voice never told him to do bad things or that something was something else. Rather than Sam being an all around stable person until the voice told him to do something, it felt quite the opposite. Sam was a confused person with a voice of reason ringing out in his head and giving him rational advice and making him do the right thing. Most of the time he listened to it. Right now he was ignoring it.

It was past-Sam trying to get his present self back on track. But it also wasn't. Sometimes it was Dean's voice, and sometimes it was his father, and sometimes it was Bobby. In the beginning, it had been Ruby and occasionally even Meg, though. Right now it was his own voice.

Until he shut it out, that is. Sam looked down at his notebook and realized he'd been writing notes this whole time but was vaguely aware of it—and he also realized that Luc's elbow was less than an inch away from his. There was a sudden nudge of the other man's leg against his, and he looked up to find Lucifer's expression softer than expected.

"You okay?" he muttered, his eyes seeming to go right through him.

"Yeah, m'fine." It was impossible to say that convincingly, especially now that he realized that shit, they were sitting close. His heart rate sped up and Luc's gaze was drilling a hole through him.

He supposed that the voice in his head was the one thing he was unsure of whether he was ever going to tell Luc. It simply seemed irrelevant to anything else that they could possibly say.

There he was, already thinking like he and Luc were going to be together forever. That wasn't healthy, and it didn't take his literal voice of reason for him to be aware of that.

With that, it became easier to just focus on the lesson and on taking notes. So he did. But it wasn't long until the professor mentioned something about how bisexuality was common and even pretty much expected of men in Ancient Greece, and that many of the Gods were depicted with both male and female lovers, and Sam couldn't help it in the least bit when he automatically turned to look at Luc for the shortest second.

Luc was already looking, it turned out. He gave an ironic smile and didn't hesitate to blow him a small kiss.

As a joke, clearly. A joke to hide the fact that there was something real going on. Except it was only pretending to hide it to actually hint at it. There was a name for the figure of speech for when that happened, Sam remembered—meiosis, that was it. An understatement for emphasis. Or a praeteritio, maybe? It wasn't exactly Luc saying he wasn't going to mention something in order to emphasize it, though. It was somewhere in between those things. Or some kind of inception with meiosis.

Sam let himself smile at the mock-but-actually-not-kiss, but didn't return it with anything more than a nudge from his own leg.

If he was Dean, he'd have been going through some "Am I bisexual?" crisis, but he was in fact Sam and not Dean, and he honestly couldn't care less about suddenly being attracted to a man when he never really had before. It didn't make much of a difference to him. Maybe he was bisexual, maybe he was straight with an asterisk, or pansexual with a preference for women—hell, maybe he had been gay this whole time and had only tricked himself into liking women somehow. He'd never had a problem with his masculinity or sexuality and he didn't think it mattered.

His mind still wandered to his brother and how long it had taken him to come to terms with being in love with Cas, though. And how their dad had told them that he'd hated Mom at first. Winchesters were all around stubborn with loving people and admitting it, but right now Sam didn't feel he had much of a problem other than the fact that he wasn't in much of a mental shape to be with anyone at the moment and that he was ignoring that fact.

Well, Sam supposed he had always been the different one. In his reverie, he then started thinking about how he wished he hadn't been in rehab when Dean had gotten married so he could have been at the wedding. He almost felt a short pang of anger that his brother hadn't waited until he was recovered to have the wedding, but that was a pretty selfish thought.

Throughout the lesson, he found himself and Luc glancing to each other with no real purpose more often than last time. When the professor dismissed the class without mentioning homework or any reading assignments for Friday, Luc grinned at him and said, "Awesome, now there's nothing for me to stress over not doing."

As he laughed and packed up his things and stood up to leave, a thought occurred to Sam. He didn't bring himself to vocalize it until they were nearly out of the classroom, though—

"What other classes do you have?"

"Uh… Anatomy," Luc began, counting on his fingers, "Calculus, Psychology, and Business Law." The look he threw Sam right after was one that said he knew that was really Sam wanting to know how many times a week he would see him.

God, Lucifer already knew he was anxious to see him as much as possible and he was playing on that. And Sam liked it.

When he responded with a "Hm" (which meant "Well shit, you're not in any of my Friday classes but this one") and turned back to go in the direction of the dormitories to drop his stuff off, Sam wished he had thought to get Luc's number.

The workload that came with college classes was a blessing in disguise. Sam could spend his nights busy and not constantly thinking about Luc—and really, keeping him from focusing on him for too long made it better once the man finally popped up in his mind again.

On Friday during lunch, Amelia and her friends told him that they and a couple other friends would be going out for dinner in town that night and asked if he'd like to come along.

It wasn't difficult at all to catch the cogs working behind her eyes—Sam might have just never found the number I slipped him, she was probably thinking. So I'll just take him out to dinner myself—under the guise of a whole bunch of friends hanging out, of course.

Despite the fact that he knew Amelia's intention with all this, it still wasn't purely a romantic outing between them and definitely didn't have to be if Sam didn't want to make it one, so he agreed. He simultaneously felt bad, as he figured this might lead her on more, but then he practically heard Lucifer's voice in his head saying, It's her fault if she assumes agreeing to going out as a group of friends automatically has romantic implications, and you have no reason to assume she wants to be anything more than friends with you, so you can't be blamed if she gets upset.

Yeah, exactly. Plus, Sam figured, maybe after this dinner with friends, once she saw that he wasn't going to attempt to flirt in the least bit, Amelia would get that he wasn't interested.

"Great!" Her eyes lit up as he agreed. "We'll—uh, all be riding together in my van to make it easier, so meet us outside the cafeteria at eight so we can all walk down to my car."

For a moment Sam wasn't too sure why he'd agreed—but then he remembered. This was just like high school. He needed something like this—just a good, normal night with friends (well, they would all grow to become his friends, he was sure), and no worrying about homework or thinking about Luc. Yeah, this was good for him. A slow return to normalcy.

Greek Mythology that day wasn't too unlike the day before, though Sam was trying to shake off all the feelings that Luc had given him by the time he was leaving. He was glad Luc hadn't asked him to do anything with him today, as he knew he would have canceled his plans with Amelia and her friends in a heartbeat if that had happened.

The idea startled him a little—that was already willing to drop everything for the guy, and even more the fact that he didn't care about that development as much as he should have.

Around eight just like Amelia had planned, Sam showed up at the cafeteria to find her with her two friends that she hung around at lunch, as well as two guys and one girl he hadn't met before but seemed vaguely familiar. After somewhat awkward introductions, he learned their names were Max, Andrew, and Rose. And he was reminded (yes, he had actually kind of forgotten) that Amelia's two friends' names were Ava and Lily.

Feeling slightly bad that he'd forgotten their names, Sam headed out to Amelia's van with them all, finding it somehow easy to make conversation with them all. Max was slightly awkward and nervous about making a new friend at first, but he warmed up easily afterward, and Andrew was extremely outgoing and was talking to Sam like he'd known him forever before the engine of the van was even running.

Lily talked to Rose quite a bit, and it wasn't very difficult for Sam to tell that they were, at the very least, in love with each other. He'd always had a knack for noticing that kind of thing—in high school it had helped him set up a couple of his friends together, and he was pretty sure they were still married, and then of course there was Dean and Cas. God, they had taken forever to come out and say the L-word…. But Sam had noticed from early on how they would look at and talk to each other.

And now he was trying to watch and see if they were together without seeming like he was looking at them too much. He just had to know if he was right.

Amelia drove them to The Roadhouse, which Sam was half-glad for because he'd actually been there enough to have a good taste for the food but half-nervous because he knew the owners and hadn't seen them since before he was put in rehab. He just hoped they didn't mention anything about it.

When they all left the van, Sam noticed Lily's hand intertwine with Rose's and briefly had a moment of victory (and also of being quietly happy for them) in his head. The man who seated them was one he didn't recognize, but they were about halfway to the booth when there was a thunk of a mug being set harshly down on the bar and a "Sam Winchester, that you?"

He turned around to see Ellen's surprised smile as she hoisted herself over the bar and came over to hug him none too gently—yep, nothing had changed about her.

"Glad to see you back on your feet, boy," she said proudly as she stepped away. "What are you doing in the area?"

"I'm going to KU," he told her, glad she'd been vague about rehab. And he remembered, just then, that he hadn't come alone. "These are my—uh, friends."

"Yeah, I figured—what, do you think I'm stupid?" She looked at him with that motherly scolding expression he remembered so fondly, and then to Amelia and the others. "Sorry to keep you guys, he's an old family friend," she explained, patting Sam's arm. "But don't think that means you're getting a cheaper meal. I'll get Jo to serve you guys."

As she walked off, Ava let out a giggle. "She's a pretty blunt woman, isn't she?"

"Yeah," Sam agreed, continuing the way to their booth. "She was like a second mother to me."

Familiar settings, familiar air—even familiar wood. This was really good for him. In fact, he could remember sitting in this exact booth, and in the exact same spot. It had been back before the place had been burnt down and rebuilt—back when Sam had only been a kid. For a moment, it was a literal blast into the past, and Sam could see a twelve year-old Dean sitting on the outer edge (as he'd insisted on letting him have the seat next to the wall), listening intently to what Dad was saying as he sat across the table. A cough from Jo, who seemed to suddenly be standing next to their table, brought him back into reality, and his heart ached.

Jo hadn't seen Sam much when he'd still been on the road trip, so she didn't have much to say to him other than "S'good to see you again, buddy" and to ask him what he wanted to eat.

Now that they all knew that Sam had known the Harvelles for most of his life, they had a lot of questions to ask him and Sam had a lot of things to vaguely answer. Of course he wasn't going to tell them that his dad had become a bounty hunter when he was young and had died a few years ago, and he wasn't going to let them know about how his big brother and his dad's friend Bobby had been the only real father figures he'd ever had. The most significant detail they got was that he grew up on the road and that his dad's job required him to travel. And then a few lies here and there.

He was grateful when Jo brought their food, for it meant everyone could direct their focus more to eating and also change the topic of conversation to something else. It was a lot more fun when he wasn't dodging questions about his life.

But now that he wasn't talking as much to the whole table, Sam began noticing that Amelia was sneaking looks at him from across the table where all the girls were and being very obviously flirtatious. Her voice inflections and gestures were barely subtle, and at this point it was actually making him uncomfortable. He wasn't interested—why couldn't she see that? Maybe she just thought he was oblivious. Except that's a stupid thing to think, he thought with slight irrational anger, as she must have already noticed how intelligent and un-oblivious he was to everything else.

Later when Andy and Max were laughing over Lily accidentally spilling ketchup on herself, Sam excused himself to the bathroom—both because he wanted to get away from everyone and because he actually had to pee.

It was significantly more relaxing in the empty bathroom, but when he left and involuntarily glanced toward the bar, he spotted the side of a very familiar face and his heart rate immediately spiked.

"Did you follow me here?" he asked calmly once he'd approached and leaned against the bar, folding his arms. It was only then that Luc looked innocently up from his drink and then smirked.

"'Course not, Sam," he said in a tone that implied more of a You'll never know. "Though I might have if you'd actually told me you were going to be here." He pulled his glass of what looked like whisky up to his lips and chuckled into it, and for those few seconds Sam was too jealous of how the edge of the glass got to be caressed by his lips like that to care that this was starting to register as a stalkerish situation.

"Just seems kind of weird that we'd both happen to be here on the same night." And still, somehow, Sam's voice was calm and unaccusing. Yeah, Luc might have followed him there, but wasn't that a sure sign that he was into him and wanted more interaction with him?

That's unhealthy desire and you know it. He could only have followed you here if he listened in on a conversation or saw you leaving and that's just creepy.

But maybe he'd just been too nervous to ask.

He watched you without you knowing. That's deceit and you shouldn't be attracted to that.

Sometimes deceit was necessary to get what you wanted.

But you are not an object, Sam. You know who else does this kind of thing? Rapists and murderers.

Sam didn't even have proof that Luc had followed him here, though.

You know he did.

Who cared? The idea somehow actually thrilled him.

"Yeah," Luc agreed. "Weird." He shook his glass slightly to circle the drink in it as he seemed to mull a thought over. "So are you gonna sit down with me or are you going back to those people?"

Those people. Not "your friends," but those people. It was like Luc knew exactly how Sam actually felt about them.

"I'm… gonna go back to them."

He'd have liked to have drinks with Luc and see what happened from there, but just leaving his friends would have been extremely rude. And even if they were just those people, he still cared about not being a gigantic dick.

Luc nodded with disappointment evident in the way he swallowed his drink, and Sam turned away to go walk back over to the booth. Once he sat down, though—

"Who was that?" Max asked through a bite of ribs.

"Friend from Greek Mythology class," said Sam swiftly, and the whole rest of the table seemed to be colored impressed or at least interested that he took that course.

Amelia didn't have anything to say about that, but Ava leaned forward a bit and said, "You should invite him over! I think we can handle another person at the booth… make the boys' side even."

Just as Andy was indefinitely about to say something along the lines of "Excuse you, we're men, not boys," Luc was standing at the side of the table as though he'd somehow walked there at lightning speed without them even noticing.

"Thought you'd never ask, Sam," Luc drawled, sounding vaguely flirtatious but in almost a mocking-way, to hide the fact there was something real underneath. Or at least Sam assumed it was real. And he hoped so, vaguely and in the back of his mind.

Having simultaneously dreaded and hoped for this exact thing to happen, Sam felt his conflicting emotions working up a violent storm that just blended evenly into nervous panic as he scooted over to let Luc take the edge next to him. Now he was squeezed between Max and Luc, their legs practically pressed together.

"So, uh… yeah. This is Luc."

Introductions were much simpler than they would have been if he'd mentioned it was short for Lucifer. But of course, no one was going to question what sounded like "Luke" without seeing it written down.

Everyone warmed up to him pretty easily, too. He was friendly and charming and handsome even in several conventional ways, and every part of his demeanor that needed polishing in order for him to seem completely normal was lost to a polite laugh. Sam realized he didn't like having Lucifer around when there were other people trying to talk to the both of them—he didn't like to share. So he made an effort to hold most of the conversation that Lucifer took part in and ended up looking at him far more than he looked at anyone else.

His lack of attention on Amelia turned her tone somewhat clipped, and when she began to flirt with him again, Sam felt a hand grip his thigh and stroke possessively. There was absolutely no way that was an accident, but he still didn't feel nearly as surprised as he should have been. He barely even glanced to Luc because of it, as he didn't need to in order to know what it was for.

The fact that he didn't protest was answer enough for Luc that Sam agreed—if he belonged to anyone there, it was Luc. As he let Amelia flirt at him but didn't respond accordingly to her advances, he couldn't help but feel that the fact he had his thigh gripped by the man sitting next to him right now should have tipped her off even though she couldn't see it.

Luc dipped his hand more into Sam's inner thigh when Ava began flirting with him, as though to say, In case you couldn't tell yet, I have no real interest in her.

Sam guessed Ava saw a similar thing in him that he did. But he was suddenly jealous and felt an immense urge to interrupt the flirting, lean over, and plant Luc a huge kiss on the lips just as a dramatic way to establish that both of them were taken. And oh man, that hand on his thigh was driving him crazy. The idea of making out with him right there in front of everyone suddenly seemed like a great one—a great one he couldn't expect himself to pull through in spite of the drinks.

Luc didn't seem drunk enough to initiate anything more than the thigh-thing, though, and he'd had whisky. The guy must have had a fairly strong alcohol tolerance. As the night went on, he would steal food off Sam's plate and he'd get slightly annoyed but wouldn't care much else. By the end of it, there was still a hand on his thigh and Sam's right hand had gone to Luc's ass.

When everyone decided that it was a good time to just go to bed and to pay and leave, he expected Luc to pull him away from the others and tell him to go back in his car instead, or what the number for his dorm room was, or some other plan to meet up later for something further than groping—but instead what he got was a wink and a simple "This was fun. See you Monday, Sam."

He just stared as Luc walked out ahead of them, attempting to hide his deep annoyance that he would purposely make him get aroused and then leave him for the weekend. That fucker.

"Good God, he is a babe," Ava giggled the moment he left the building. "I think he seemed kind of interested in me…."

"No," corrected Sam sharply, almost feeling as though he wasn't even speaking with his own voice, and everyone looked to him like he'd said the rudest thing in the world. And really, he kind of had. "He wasn't."


	3. Nobody understands vegetarians

Sam was reminded of the harsh reality of college weekends when the next morning came, but this time around, he didn't mind so much. He had an excuse to avoid other people (like he wouldn't even have wanted before the Jess-roadtrip-Ruby business) and something to keep him busy.

College homework seemed to be one of those forces of relativity because it was measured in time, and the amount that you had really depended on what kind of person you were, not on your classes. It depended on the responsibility you felt was necessary to take for your education and if you had anything better to do.

So for someone like Adam, who had several friends as well as a weekend job in town at some hotdog place, homework was an hour of bullshitting answers and vaguely studying before he left the dormitory and socialized.

For Sam, who wanted as little other time as possible during the weekend to do anything, and whose friends now likely thought less of him because of his rude outburst on Friday, it was several hours of researching and studying and writing. And it still wasn't enough. He was left with an almost completely free Sunday which he eventually decided to use simply browsing Youtube and occasionally debating calling Dean just to have a conversation.

He didn't end up doing that second thing, though ( _because I'm supposed to be independent and if he wants to check up on me he can, but I'm not gonna call him just because I don't feel like being completely alone at the moment,_  he thought stubbornly). A couple times, however, he considered calling Luc until he realized he still didn't even have his number.

Ava was slightly less friendly with him on Monday during lunch, but for the most part it seemed she wasn't going to hold that against him. Sam still had the fact that she liked Luc (when she didn't deserve to) against her, though, so it was even. It wasn't like she even had any chance, but he still couldn't help the surge of jealousy. And then he wondered if Amelia had felt jealous upon seeing his interaction with Lucifer or if she even guessed that there was something between them.

By the sound of her voice as she made conversation with him, she sounded like she was still trying. Sam almost felt like humoring her at this point.

Until, of course, his voice of reason flashed the red alarm in his head that that would have been remarkably cruel, and he registered that thinking like that was definitely not him. For a moment he was scared by himself for thinking that, but the feeling left as smoothly and almost unnoticeably as his mind went through the routine of detaching from his body.

He had to leave lunch early.

* * *

"I hate Mondays," Luc said seemingly out of nowhere. He hadn't said much at all in class so far, and he hadn't even mentioned Friday night. His voice was casual, as though he'd been contributing to a conversation, as was the turn of his head to face Sam and the expression on his face. "But I also like Mondays. I met you on a Monday."

The simplicity and bluntness of it made Sam let out a small, quiet huff of laughter, and Luc's face drew his attention away from the teacher and made him lean on his hand, propped up on his elbow. "You met me exactly a week ago."

"Exactly. We should celebrate."

It seemed for a second that he was joking, and Sam didn't know whether he would have found relief or disappointment at that. A moment later his face was set and his brow was raised in suggestion and— _holy hell_ , that hand was on Sam's thigh again, and it was clear he was serious. Considering that they hadn't even touched each other other than short, secretive groping, it should have seemed strange that he would essentially want to celebrate a week-anniversary of knowing each other. Then again, the time they'd known each other was more than likely just a fact that happened to be true at the moment rather than actual reasoning.

Either way, Sam didn't care. "So you want to just leave class and do something?" he prompted, assuming that was where it was going.

Luc's mouth stretched into a lazy grin and he'd put his notebook away in his bag before Sam could say anything else, the look in his eyes urging him to do the same.

"Hey, you suggested it," he laughed, and once Sam had his things away, he discreetly (or tried to be, though his height made that kind of impossible) inched sideways down their tier of desks until he reached the edge so he and Lucifer could leave.

The relatively small size of the classroom meant no back door, which generally gave professors the advantage of knowing any student who decided to leave in the middle of class would have to do so in front of everyone and risk being humiliated or at least stared at. And they were indeed stared at, but their focus was too much on the prospect of having time to spend alone together without classes or "friends" to care. Luc didn't seem like much of the type of person who cared, anyway.

Other students milling in the hallway glanced in their direction for only a moment as they walked out together, and some gazes felt like they lingered for a moment longer—but mostly because of Sam's height, he still figured. Rather than stopping to discuss anything, the both of them just kept walking. Well, Luc walked and Sam followed.

"So," Sam said sharply, almost expecting it to make Luc stop. It didn't. "Where are we going?"

He expected an answer like "the Starbucks on campus" or "outside" or " _my bedroom_ ," but Luc simply glanced at him with a shrug and continued walking.

"I don't know yet. Away from people."

It turned out that there was barely anyone on the campus grounds, especially around the clusters of trees that stood far out from the beginning of the path from the building they were in. Luc didn't want to talk until they made it there, so it was about ten minutes (or what felt like it) of walking with him in near silence. Although, not wanting to talk didn't mean that he didn't say anything. Talking implied conversation—and sometimes Luc just wanted to say things and Sam could tell he didn't care whether or not he responded.

"I think I might be spending too much time inside. My skin's getting pale."

"My psychology professor told me I might be a psychopath."

"I don't understand vegetarians."

Strangely enough, it was that one that Sam replied to, rather than the one prior:

"Me neither."

In the beginning of his days in rehab, he'd been put on a vegetarian diet. It hadn't helped much, and he still remembered it with disgust for all that tofu-based crap. He still had no idea why they had thought it would help him overcome his drug problems.

"This is cheesy as Hell," Sam said when Luc stopped under the shade of a large tree and pulled him down to the ground to sit with him. He barely even stopped to think about what he'd said implied this was a sort of romantic outing—which it kind of was, wasn't it? How else would he have interpreted it?

"It's only cheesy if you make it cheesy," said Luc, crossing his legs and looking oddly innocent, like a child, in that position. It was almost refreshing to see him like that. He then draped his arms over his knees and seemed to  _breathe_  both confidence and calm.

At once, Sam kicked his bag off to the side and shifted himself closer to Luc. This felt vaguely like all his high school romances all over again—except he'd been rampant with hormones back then and completely unaffected by any drugs. There was a sense of attachment he felt for the man sitting in front of him that he was pretty sure he hadn't had the capacity to feel in high school.

"Tell me about why you're taking college again," Luc said almost gently, though it still startled him very slightly because the question seemed to just pop up out of the silence. His eyes were trained on Sam with pure, childish curiosity to match his sitting position. He didn't say it like he'd just now thought of the idea—he'd probably planned this all along. "You said you'd tell me about it sometime."

Sam's mouth stretched into a small, somewhat shy smile as he looked down, his gestures saying,  _I did, didn't I?_

"I, uh—in my junior year of high school, I already had an early ride for Stanford," he began, not even feeling the need to sigh anecdotally beforehand. The start of his story slipped off his tongue with barely any thought, as though it was sentient and  _really_  wanted to tell itself. "And I wanted to be a lawyer, so that was the best thing for me. But during my first semester, my girlfriend Jess was killed in a fire that started in our dorm while I was away."

Sam found himself relaying that horrific detail with barely even a twitch passing over his expression, and yet he noticed something change behind Luc's eyes at those words. He couldn't tell if it was pity or interest or something else.

It was strangely easy to tell him everything. There was no mercy or glossing over any of the details, and he didn't neglect to mention any of the questionable things he'd done even before the drugs, nor did he leave the major scenes of drug abuse up to Luc's imagination. He was the only person to know about this besides Dean, Cas, and Bobby, and it might have been for that reason that Sam was so willing to spill everything out. For once, he had someone to trust with his story.

He told him about the intervention and then Ruby's death, and then the year of rehabilitation and signing back up for college. " _A new start_ ," he called it, and he caught Luc's eyes very distinctly fading to relief. Whether that was for the very end or the whole story, he wasn't sure, nor was he going to ask.

There was a smooth fade into silence between them—the silence of Sam's voice as well as Luc's mind. It was almost as though the former could see the cogs in his brain voluntarily slow to a halt and hear the buzzing stop. Just silence. Not really uncomfortable, though. It was calm.

"You're the first person I've told about that," Sam decided to let him know after several seconds. Though he felt slightly stupid for saying so afterward because Luc clearly found that fact obvious.

"…Do you ever plan to tell anyone else?" Luc asked quietly, and it actually did occur to Sam, this time, that that was an odd thing to ask. Until he realized the purpose for it and silently agreed he would have asked the same thing, that is.

"Probably not."

Luc turned to him and inhaled him. With his eyes, his slow breath, and his very slight smile that could have been mistaken for him squinting had they been in the light. Sam loved it when he looked at him like that. The feeling was impossible to describe. Another few moments of silence, and then the words that disturbed the still air were somehow not unexpected—

"I had a feeling. About the drugs." His dull-by-nature expression was still dotted with a strange sort of relief, and now by slight amusement as well as what must have been a flash of pain. "My mom's eyes would look the same as yours do now when she managed to stay sober for a week or so."

He actually looked sort of sad for a second. It was a strange look on Luc's face, and it only made sense that it wouldn't last long. As he narrowed his eyes ever so slightly, he raised a hand to gesture to Sam's eyes and then lest his fingers rest right there on his temple.

"And you seem to float away sometimes," he went on, just as calmly. "Like you're not mentally here. It only happens when you're not talking to me, but I can tell."

Something about Luc's voice made Sam's jaw set, and he tilted his head a bit so the man didn't have to look that far up. With a swallow that wasn't very big but still caused a significant disturbance in his throat, he admitted, "…Yeah, talking to you helps."

He'd known all along, that sneaky bastard. He probably knew how he was able to pull Sam around without even trying, too. He probably did it on purpose. And yet the thought of it made Sam want to get closer—that, and Luc's fingers sliding from his temple down to his shoulder, he base of his palm resting on his chest.

"Sam." Luc's voice broke the silence again. His hand shifted to Sam's collar. "Can I kiss you?"

It turned out that no, he couldn't, because Sam's control broke the very moment the K-word rolled off Luc's lips, and it propelled him forward to kiss the other man before he had a chance. He hadn't even thought to nod in the split second that he moved forward, but he figured the frantic attachment of his mouth to Luc's was enough of an answer.

Oh  _God_ , he didn't know why he hadn't done this sooner. This was perfect. It wasn't simply that they'd both wanted it and now had it, but also that it felt as though they fit together perfectly. Like Luc's lips were made specifically for Sam to mould his own to, like his cheekbones were structured with the intent for Sam's nose to be able to fit right there, like both of their hands were built to create extreme pleasure when they held each other's faces close.

Luc didn't seem to mind that he hadn't been able to initiate it, as his mouth responded with enthusiasm and he eagerly allowed Sam to press him up against the tree and direct the kiss. Briefly breaking it just to breathe for a moment, he slid his right hand up from Sam's neck to his hair, threading his fingers through it and taking advantage of the control he had with a tug every few seconds. Almost at once, Sam pressed his lips harder to Luc's and did the same with  _his_  hair, as well as pulling himself up to straddle one of his legs just to get closer.

The repeated tugs of his hair had Sam practically growling into Luc's mouth as it opened under his tongue. He could hear the both of them breathing, and occasionally moaning very slightly, and if he listened just a bit closer, he could hear Luc's heart beat alongside his own. Every movement of lips and tongues, every sigh of Lucifer's breath into his own mouth, every touch, and every tug of his hair sent Sam reeling much too far away from himself, only to then pull him back sharply and in a way that made him want so much more.

It was nothing short of addicting. Not to mention how new the feeling was—kissing a man was significantly different from kissing a woman. Men's lips were distinctly firm rather than soft, and their jaws were stronger and actually something you wanted to hold onto. And every time he shifted his lips, Sam felt the soft scrape of both of their stubble rubbing together. He suddenly couldn't remember what it had ever been like to only feel attracted to women—though this wasn't just any man he was kissing; it was  _Lucifer_. And it was… it was practically like _drugs_.

At least ten minutes seemed to have passed, and they both had their tongues deep into each others' mouths right when Luc jerked away sharply and smacked the hand he'd been about to undo Sam's zipper with on his neck.

" _Shit_ ," he hissed with a nasty expression of sudden pain and resentment, and as he wiped his hand away, small black bits of what was probably a dead ant came off and fell to the grass. He looked to a still-recovering Sam somewhat apologetically. "It bit me."

But Sam couldn't really say he was all that disappointed—hearing Luc curse for the first time, and so somehow  _sexy_ , forced his eyes more widely open in a sudden increase of arousal. He let out a short laugh and fisted the back of Luc's shirt to pull them both away from the tree to avoid more biting ants, which just ended up having Sam on his back on the ground and Luc above him.

"This better?" Sam laughed, dragging the other man's head down for a slow kiss.

"You tell me," he breathed into the kiss as he rolled his hips down into Sam's—until he heard what sounded like voices in the distance and looked up with minimal urgency. "Those people are looking at us."

More out of curiosity than actual concern or embarrassment, Sam craned his neck back and spotted about three people on the other side of this part of the grounds. They were too far to make out their faces, so he felt sure he and Luc wouldn't be recognized. But nevertheless, the main point got across. They certainly couldn't do this in public.

"My dorm's on the first floor," Sam said quickly, and they were both standing and grabbing their bags within the next few seconds and then heading quickly down the path that led through the trees and across the grounds to the dormitory buildings. Their hands gripped tightly together, they wasted no time, but about halfway there Luc breathlessly and jokingly suggested,

"If you piggy-backed me there we'd probably be quicker."

Though he did pick up that it was mostly a joke, Sam didn't see why not, so he bent down and scooped Luc up so fast that he barely had time to wrap his arms around his neck to keep from falling backwards as Sam continued jogging.

That was… unexpected.

But damn, Sam was  _strong as Hell_.

And Lucifer liked it a lot.

"You okay?" Sam thought to ask as he felt Luc's hands and legs wrapping around his desperately to hold on.

He just ran a hand over Sam's chest as an incentive to hurry up. And he got a shift of Sam's hand on his leg in return.

Of course, it was inevitable that anyone who saw them would stare at them. Their minds probably didn't even go to the conclusion that Sam and Luc were headed to a bedroom, as piggy-back rides weren't innately sexual. But they passed people without turning to look and continued to give no fucks, until finally they were in front of Sam's room and he let him down only to immediately get pressed to the door by Luc's hands and mouth.

Not caring if anyone happened to walk by and see, Sam grabbed Luc's waist and kissed back just as hard, breaking just to say, "Key's in my back pocket."

With a flurry of motion, the door was unlocked and opened, and then slammed shut as they stumbled inside the room, locked together in arms and faces as their legs worked them in the direction of Sam's bed.

Twisting them around so that Luc 's back was facing the bed, Sam pushed him onto the mattress and pulled his shirt off simultaneously, allowing Luc to push his own shirt off as he climbed over him and pinned him to the bed. For who knows how long, they kissed until they were raw and slipped their legs in interlocking order so that they both had something to grind on. The bare skin of their chests met each other and made Sam suck in a breath, getting gradually filled with the desire to press kisses down Luc's jaw and neck instead of his mouth.

 _Oh, that mouth._  It was hot and skillful as Hell and shaped like Sam's name.

" _Sam_." He was pleasantly surprised with how Luc had said it. Like he needed  _him_  to stay grounded, too.

He was also surprised with how able he was at pleasuring a man, considering his lack of experience with men. But then he supposed the mechanics weren't all that different—only how he felt. Because he couldn't remember even the sex with Ruby being this great, and this was just… well, it was rutting against each other like a couple of horny teenagers.

Except Sam was far stronger now than he'd been as a teenager, and he didn't feel the need to be gentle because Luc wasn't a woman and also had clearly expressed that  _he_  didn't need him to be gentle either, so by extension he was far more merciless with the rocking of his hips than he would have been in high school. Judging by the sounds coming from him, Luc enjoyed it, too.

When the friction of cotton and thick denim became too uncomfortable, it vaguely registered to Sam that their pants weren't going to come off themselves—and Luc seemed to have the same idea, as his hands almost immediately flew to undo off Sam's belt and unzip his pants, then pushing them, along with his boxers, halfway down his ass. He took the advantage to palm Sam's erection until he had his pants down as well, at which Sam swatted his hand away, pinning it to the bed with his own, and began grinding their bare erections together.

"God,  _Luc_ …," Sam moaned sharply, the sensation alien and rippling. His face went through a medley of expressions compressed into a few seconds before his eyes fluttered open again and he noticed Luc's cocky, mid-moan smile below him and arched his neck down to kiss it.

He soon freed Luc's hands from the bed and used his own to feel all over his torso when they weren't pressed directly together, and Luc made straight for Sam's ass to grab and squeeze and pull closer.

With how long it had been since he'd last had sex, Sam was surprised he even had lasted this long. But when he did feel himself about to climax and noticed that Luc was pretty close as well, they grinded it out and continued to roll their hips until they came—and they were so deep into it that they hadn't heard the door open or noticed someone standing at the doorway in shock.

"Oh  _shit_ —Sam, listen, I don't care who you fuck, just to make that clear, but put a damn sock on the doorknob or at least  _lock_  it or something, okay?"

Luckily just then coming  _off_  of their orgasms, they were startled by the sudden complaint from Adam, who was standing by the door and shielding his eyes from seeing their naughty bits as he spoke. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but Sam couldn't find much pity or shame in himself at all and made no real attempt to cover their lower sections. Instead, he instinctively held Luc tightly and protectively and felt the man below him do the same.

Although Luc was also making a thin-lipped smile of accomplishment, as Sam noticed when Adam waved them off and left the room to give them time to dress themselves. His expression faded into one of more sleepy complacency when he lolled his head back over to meet Sam's gaze again. Those eyes were pretty clearly asking for another kiss, so he gave him one and then rolled off.

"At least we didn't accidentally do it on Adam's bed," joked Sam as he pulled up his underwear and pants, and then found a dirty shirt in the laundry pile to wipe the semen off of his and Luc's chests. As he did, though, two fingers on each side hooked through his belt loops, and the man they connected to was looking up at him under hooded eyes.

"That was the first time you've done that, I'm guessing?"

"With a man, yeah. Or I suppose women don't have cocks to even do that with, so yeah in general. …You?"

"Nah," Luc shrugged. "But this was the first time it was good."

"Guys, come on, I'm right out here," came Adam's voice from outside the door, interrupting the beginnings of a thought process Luc's comment was throwing fuel on. "Save the pillow talk for later. I got stuff to do."

Luc sharply rose an amused eyebrow at the door and, purposely contrary to Adam's request, pulled Sam down by his neck for a long, languid kiss before looking for his shirt on the floor and putting it on. After another minute or so, Adam was finally allowed back in the room and stood awkwardly for several seconds while Sam and Luc sat on his bed.

"So. Uh." Shuffling his feet, Adam took a moment to look either of them in the eye. "Yeah, this was a pretty awkward way for us to meet, but if you're Sam's boyfriend, I guess I'll be seeing more of you, so I might as well introduce myself…." He began to stick his hand forward but pulled it back before Luc could put his own forward, a dawning look of realization and relief on his face. "Wait—yeah, no, I'm pretty sure you didn't wash your hands in the last couple minutes and while Sam's a nice guy, I'd rather not get his semen on my hand, so. I'm Adam. And I think I've seen you around the campus?"

Sam found himself watching Luc carefully, gauging his expression and the tone of his voice. Unlike how he'd looked when Sam had first met him, his face revealed a complete lack of real interest. No eye contact, and where a casually friendly smile would have been on most people was a slightly strained one instead—one that said  _I couldn't care less if I've seen you before. I have no time for you._  It wasn't unlike the look he'd given Ava when she'd flirted with him.

"Maybe," he told him, and Sam noticed that Luc's voice held a different quality when he was speaking to anyone other than him. Or it lacked something. He'd have said  _interest_  based on his moment-previous observances, but there seemed to be something else, possibly bigger. "I'm Luc. You're welcome, by the way," he added nonchalantly.

"For what?" said Adam curiously, furrowing his brow.

"Having the feeling which of these was Sam's bed so that we didn't have sex on yours instead. I get the feeling most people don't like that." Luc then smiled as though completely aware that what he'd just said was socially unacceptable but also didn't care. For the few seconds following that, Adam nearly gaped and Sam's eyes widened.

 _Woah, okay._  Sam quickly registered that that probably wasn't good to say. But he also got the sense that it  _wasn't_  some sort of social ineptitude that had made Luc feel the need to say it.

"Uh, okay. That's good. Glad you guys didn't fuck on my bed, then." Adam gave one sharp, low nod to acknowledge he was done with the awkwardness of that conversation and then went to sit on his own bed and open his bag. "I have homework and shit to do, though, so if you guys plan on staying in here, it would be great if you could get the noise to a minimum and not start making out or anything. Hey—actually, Sam, shouldn't you have been in class for the past hour?"

"We left," he said simply. Which seemed to imply  _We got horny and left_ —to Adam, at least. Sam didn't feel like correcting his assumption. He didn't feel the need to mention that he wasn't actually gay (which he also figured Adam assumed now). Especially considering that he himself didn't know or care what his sexuality was. So it wasn't any of his business.

Although, Adam had also assumed they were boyfriends, and Sam was really wondering about that now— _were_  they boyfriends? Sam liked the idea. Loved it, in fact. He wanted this by no means to be a one-time thing. He also got the feeling that Luc felt the same—especially by the hand he felt gripping his thigh and the chin resting on his shoulder in the next second.

"Do you want me to stay, then?" he asked smoothly, and if Adam wasn't in the room, Sam might have attacked his mouth all over again.

After a short pause where his mind briefly shorted out, he reluctantly said, "Well, I should really get to finding out what the lesson was that we missed, and doing some research for English…."

He really would have liked him to stay. But there wasn't much he was willing to do with Adam ten feet away, and Luc certainly had work to get to as well.

"Hm." His lips forming into a small pout of disappointment, Luc stood up and simultaneously leaned in to not so much kiss Sam as seemingly fall straight into his lips and stay there for a solid eight seconds. "See you."

Figuring that confirmed their relationship, Sam grinned at him as he walked around the bed to pick up his bag and walk out of the room. There was a sharp feeling of loss and pain once the door shut all the way and the hinges and lock clicked, but he ignored it.

" _Dude_." Sam heard the shuffle of bedsheets as Adam shifted himself on his mattress and sat up straighter, then turned to look at his roommate. "Your boyfriend's kind of an asshole."

That insult hit him personally, and so Sam frowned at him but kept from getting too angry. "Or who knows, maybe your personalities don't click and you're just the asshole."

Meanwhile, he did understand what Adam meant. Luc hadn't exactly come off as liking him or even really respecting him. But, as strange as it was even in Sam's own mind, he felt satisfied with that. Like having Luc even treat anyone besides him like a human being would have made him jealous and irrationally angry.

Adam scoffed rather than getting angrier in return. "Whatever, man. If he's good to you then I guess that's good."

The hum of his laptop beginning to overheat and the continuous tapping of his keys seemed to end the conversation, and Sam was glad that he didn't feel obligated to say anything more. Instead he inched himself further up the bed to get to his own bag and laptop—until, that is, he noticed his phone sitting on the pillow.

Weird. He could have sworn that his phone had been in his pocket.

Right then he thought no more of it and just stuffed the phone back into his pants, but a couple hours and a slice of frozen pizza later, he ended up checking his phone out of boredom and noticed something new about his contacts.

What had used to be only  _Dean_ ,  _Cas_ , and  _Bobby_  was now four contacts—the last being  _Lucifer_.

Sam tapped the bar on his touch-screen and grinned, then began to type out a message.


	4. Humans are just the worst thing

It soon proved impossible for Sam to stay off his phone for more than an hour. In the mornings, he would check for a text from Luc. And then he'd continue to reply until Luc had some reason to not respond or until his Law class began—whichever came first. But he'd have to check again at the end of each class in case he hadn't felt his phone vibrate, just to make sure.

Gary eyed him strangely when he started acting somewhat like a negligent teenager by texting once or twice during class, but he luckily didn't ask about it because he wasn't rude, and also likely because he'd figured the same thing that Sam had—he already knew so much about Law that he could afford to pay a little less attention.

During lunch was the ideal time, and it actually was then, despite the fact that Luc had class at that time, that there was a steady stream of texts from him. It was not so much conversational stuff as it was them telling each other whenever something of the slightest interest happened.

_My Calculus professor has an annoying voice. I feel like if I jumped on her chest she would wheeze out a whole bunch of air and then sound deeper. L_

_And then you know her sternum might break and she'll die but that's a minor problem, right?_

_At this point I might actually resort to praying for that to happen. L_

_It's only been a couple weeks—_

Nah, he didn't think he'd send that one. Sam held the backspace button down and restarted fresh on the blank page that was there when he lifted his finger.

_I don't know why I'm surprised that you're an atheist._

There was a full two minutes' wait for the next response:

_Not really. I just hate the Church. And the idea that people can get what they want through faith rather than actually working for it. L_

Upon reading that, the grin that his mouth kept breaking into faded into more of a fond smile, as this was one of those times that Luc actually proved to be fairly intelligent on top of it all.

And then the smooth scraping sound of a plastic cup being set down on the table jerked him back into being aware there was anything other than Luc and the satellite connection between them, though he didn't actually look up until—

"Who're you texting? Girlfriend?"

Amelia was looking at him with feigned innocent curiosity—she seemed to be a good actress, though, because the only reason Sam knew it was feigned was because he knew for a fact she still liked him and thus wanted to know out of jealousy. And because he knew that, he also knew exactly what to look for in order to prove it: subtle pulsing of the neck, and not quite enough lift in her shoulders as she breathed—as though she was straining herself. Her voice, however, was spot on. If not for the fact that she'd said the second question of  _Girlfriend?_  far too quickly for it to be completely casual, of course.

"No," answered Sam just as normally, and actually more convincingly, as he glanced back down at the screen to start typing his reply.

A moment later he realized how easy and simple and  _logical_  it would have been for him to add "Boyfriend," and just clear things up right there. Amelia and Ava would both dawn looks of realization and then disappointment but then get over it because there would no longer be anything to chase after, and Lily would probably give him a  _Good for you_  look because she was both uninterested in men and in a committed relationship. Or perhaps even "It's Luc," which would, at the very least, have gotten Ava jealous and hinted vaguely at their relationship.

But no, Amelia was just left to once again slink down slightly in her seat and stab her lunch not-so-casually-anymore while Sam tapped out a text that he hoped would be just as profound as Luc's last one.

* * *

A week or so into their official relationship, it simultaneously felt like it had been much longer and that it hadn't been long enough. The nearly constant texting pulled Sam, briefly, into flashbacks of high school—but it was really only briefly, for it could only remind him of his teenage days on the surface level. Otherwise it was quite different than the average clingy first-love sort of relationships you had in your freshman year.

Luc texted erratically. With almost no pattern at all, he would sometimes return a text within seconds (and it would be a full sentence, too, not just " _lol_ "), and other times he took a full hour. Sam, however, responded immediately unless there was something otherwise preoccupying him that demanded his attention instead.

Luc also texted like he spoke: Most of the time either seemingly irrelevant or profound. Not much in between. In the middle of the night on the following Friday, he sent Sam one that said only:  _I've been up for hours trying to figure out which animal you reminded me of. It's a moose. You're a fucking moose, Sammy. L_

He actually let out a laugh so loud and hard that Adam jerked awake before flipping him the bird and falling back asleep. Not only because he'd gotten that comparison before, but also because Luc was either tired or enthusiastic enough to actually swear.

In his own tired haze, the only thing he could think to reply with was:  _Am I a sexy moose?_

_You're definitely one I'd love to ride. L_

Sam could quite literally see Luc's smug grin in front of him as he re-read the message once, twice.

Just the thought of it—Hell, just the thought of talking dirty over text in  _general_  already had him halfway-hard, and with a stifled gasp of air, he slipped out of his sheets quickly and made his way to the bathroom, his phone still in hand.

In the past week, they had gotten off with each other twice—including the time that Adam walked in on in the very beginning—and done an awful lot of groping and kissing. But as two men with at least moderate sex drives as well who were in a relationship with each other, they were bound to have penetrative sex at some point. Or at least, Sam wanted to. Now that he was pretty sure Luc wanted to, especially. That text got him going on the thought, and he didn't forget about it the next day. It became such a prevalent thought in his head that he figured he ought to get it over with soon, before he became too obsessed with the idea to focus on anything else.

It was surprisingly late in the day that it occurred to Sam that he wasn't experienced with gay things. Sure, he had figured out the mechanics of grinding with another man on his own and fairly easily, but that was simple and not exclusive to gay men. He figured that there just  _had_ to be things he would need to know before heading right into anal sex. Especially if Luc had already done it before and Sam ended up being the inexperienced one. He really,  _really_  did not want to be in that position.

So he decided to research it.

Ah, the glory of the internet. As a child when Sam had wanted to know how to do anything, he'd had to ask Dad or Dean. More often just Dean because he was afraid of his dad getting angry at or making fun of him for certain questions. When he'd gotten older, though, romantic advice came from the both of them whether he wanted it or not. Either way, he was pretty sure that if he had experienced any desire toward other guys back then, it wouldn't have been easy.

Now, however, he could just flop down on his bed, open his laptop, and Google " _how to have anal sex_." Yup. That should do it. He pressed the  _Enter_  bar and bit his lip, waiting less than half a second for the results to show up (which was still too long to wait). Surprisingly, most of the results were concerning straight couples having anal sex.

Alright then. He poised his hands over the keyboard to change the search:  _how to have gay anal sex_.

The first link seemed promising, so he figured he'd start there.

For Sam, all the technical terms the site used made it easier for him and not the least bit uncomfortable. It put him in a world of science and one he could relate to—not to mention it was important that he knew how everything worked. Sure, he had done pretty well in Anatomy in high school, but they hadn't delved much into sex-ed back then. Especially not gay sex.

_Reduce the pain._

This seemed to be the most helpful bit, as it was mostly what Sam had wanted to be sure of. Once he read everything from the link on how to properly lubricate, he was significantly more confident.

 _Get to know your body. Practice good hygiene. Beware of the dangers of STD's_ —

Yeah, yeah. He knew all of that already. It wasn't any different than normal sex advice after the lubrication instructions, really… although Sam did have plenty of other sites to peruse about this, just so he could be fully informed.

Some minutes later, he found a gif that simulated penetration, and he must have been extremely focused on it, for he barely realized when—

"Dude, what are you—?"

" _Woah shit_ —" Sam jumped and closed his laptop, turning to Adam like his whole body had gotten whiplash. "What the Hell, Adam?"

For a moment, he just laughed and backed up. "Just wanted to know what you were looking at, Sam," he said casually, as though  _Sam_  was the one overreacting.

"And what makes you think you have the fucking right to come up behind me and read what I'd doing? Does  _invasion of privacy_  mean anything to you?" That came out much louder and angrier than Sam had meant for, and Adam momentarily did actually seem fazed—until he held up his hands in mock-surrender and laughed again.

"Woah, calm down. You were just looking  _really_  intently at it, is all. I figured you'd notice if I walked up, anyway—"

"Yeah, well, I didn't," Sam snapped, turning his laptop away from Adam and opening it back up.

The scrawnier of the two men shoved his hands in his pockets, seeming annoyed by Sam's sudden mood, but otherwise unaffected. "…So what are you looking at that for, anyway?"

It took several seconds for Sam to say anything. Half because he was still for some reason too angry to speak calmly and half because he was too busy trying to figure out why he was so angry.

"Just. Research." Sam sighed painfully and clicked out of the page with that gif, wishing he hadn't said anything. "Now fuck off."

He could practically hear the cogs in Adam's head turning as they led up to—"Oh my God, you're a virgin, aren't you?"

"What?—No! I just haven't… God, this is none of your fucking business anyway." Shutting his laptop again in frustration, Sam pushed himself off the bed and strode over to the minifridge to grab a beer. Not so much that he needed a drink, but that he wanted to be able to turn his back on Adam for a second.

"Dude, I told you I don't care if you fuck guys. But I just assumed that you would have done it already—"

Sam threw a pillow at him, though he seriously debated throwing the beer can instead beforehand. "Shut up."

He didn't have to look or hear a faint chuckle from Adam's throat to know that the bastard was grinning smugly as he sat down on his own bed.

* * *

When Amelia invited him to another friends' night out the third Friday of the semester, Sam declined more curtly than he'd meant to and told her he already had plans. Yet again, though, he neglected to add the three words that would have put her off from pursuing him for good:  _"—with my boyfriend."_  He thought perhaps that it just seemed weird to put it like that. Thinking of Luc as his boyfriend alone literally got his heart pumping and his chest hot, but saying it out loud was kind of strange.

And really, he didn't technically have official plans as of now. Oh, he personally had plans to do something with Luc that evening, but the man in question didn't know about it yet.

As of late, while he was getting more and more annoyed with Amelia's unwanted flirting, Sam did try to not be mean to her. He would be listening to her and trying to stay on the ground but no matter how hard he tried, if he wasn't reading a text from Lucifer or typing one out at that moment, he simply couldn't. And then he would react too harshly to something Amelia or Lily or Ava said and  _for that moment_  he would feel as though his feet were held in place on the ground, but once he apologized or tried to act like it hadn't happened, he was up and away again.

It was hard to be as kind as he used to be. Or as patient. Or as understanding and sympathetic and calm. All the heroin and cocaine had probably done that to him—or maybe just the circumstances in which all of that had happened and not necessarily the drugs themselves. Maybe he'd gotten so used to a lifestyle of lying to his own brother and sneaking around with a woman who was no good for him and generally just  _doing things he wasn't supposed to_ , which in itself was a thrill, that he'd become numb to certain things. Started caring less. Lost a moral value or two.

He definitely wasn't the same person. And Sam was by no means trying to convince himself otherwise, or even really to go back to being the person he used to be. He was just trying to make it work, and so far, he was able to handle the changes in his personality and it seemed that those around him were, as well. Sometimes he said things that made them uncomfortable or downright upset for a moment, but no one had expressed any outright dislike for him yet.

And then there was Lucifer. Unlike anyone else, he preferred this new Sam. Of course, he hadn't known him before, but Luc was a good judge of him. He could probably tell that Sam had changed from some nicer, cleaner version of this, and yet he wanted the new Sam. He wasn't disappointed with anything. Rather than being annoyed by his flaws or even just ignoring them, he pointed them out and treated them like the best parts of him.

There was a voice of reason telling him that that sort of thing should have tipped him off every time that became apparent of Luc, but Sam continued to ignore it.

"Oh, okay," said Amelia smoothly when he declined. There was a smaller hint of disappointment in her voice than he'd expected, as though she was slowly getting over him, finally. "Maybe we can all do something different next Friday or during the weekend—like movie night."

"Actually, that sounds fun." Did he actually want to go along with that plan or was he just entertaining the idea out of temporary politeness? Sam wasn't sure. "Although it'll probably be hard to find something good that I haven't seen. My, uh, brother is a movie nut and always made me watch everything with him, so."

"No spoiling shit, then," Ava smirked. "And I think we should establish that  _no one_  is to have sex at movie night—I really don't want another repeat of that sleepover fiasco in high school that Lily and Rose came to and—"

"Hey, we thought everyone else was asleep."

"Can we please not do this again," Amelia sighed, as though this happened often. Sam nearly choked on his drink, for several seconds genuinely amused.

And then his mind immediately went to the idea of having sex with Luc where anyone else might see or hear, and though he didn't think he would ever do that, the idea was thrilling.

Those thoughts fueled him all the way through English 101 and had him doodling Luc's hairline on the margins of his notes. God, he was being such a  _teenager_ —though he couldn't remember ever drawing someone's hairline or actually practicing drawing out their face shape from memory as opposed to the standard hearts and initials.

There were no  _S.W. + L.M._  hearts in there. Making those would imply that he was pining.

Sam didn't feel particularly aware of himself or his surroundings until he took his seat in Greek Mythology, which felt like falling briefly and landing crisply on his feet, suddenly being shoved into his preferred, familiar situation. Everything felt more real in that seat.

Luc showed up within a couple minutes and was kissing Sam hello before his butt even reached the seat, just as he did every day they had the class together now. The first time they had done it, which was the previous Thursday, Luc had waited until a couple girls entered the classroom and were looking before leaning in so quickly it was like he was invading and pushing their lips together, close-mouthed and relatively short. Just long enough for the scrape of both of their stubble to send sensations down Sam's back and for anyone who was looking their way to get the idea: Both of them were taken.

Whenever he pulled away from Sam, Luc would have this very short and quite-easy-to-miss-if-you-didn't-look-for-it look of peace before his usual expression of confidence settled in.

Now that they were officially a thing, the flirting between them was incessant and delving more into the physical, with Luc's left hand casually resting on Sam's leg as they took notes, or on the back of his neck, or on Sam's hand. Sam remembered this sort of thing being thrilling in high school with Jess and his girlfriends before her because PDA hadn't been allowed, but now, no one actually cared. The only thing that would have made the professor tell them to stop was if they just started making out—unless they were taking a quiz (if you could call something that long a quiz), like that day, because then the professor wanted them spaced out so they wouldn't cheat.

It was relief when the lesson ended, though there was the brief moment of panic before Sam decided that he didn't need to transition smoothly into it and just said bluntly, "I want to see your dorm room. Actually, I just want to see everything you do after this lesson because you've never actually mentioned it to me."

He'd managed to say it casually, without even looking down at Luc as he said it. But then when he did look down to gauge the man's reaction, he felt sudden anxiety coming on, and he was somewhat worried until—

"I've been waiting for you to ask, Sammy," he smirked. Luc threw him a flirtatious side-glance and then looked straight forward again, moving close enough to Sam's side that their arms brushed while they walked. "Or just flat-out tell me, I guess."

That sort of thing was what made Sam feel  _alive_ , like he was kept so firmly on the ground from being chained to Luc. His hand jerked up to keep a steady hold on the area between Luc's shoulder blades, as though to keep himself from being pulled too far down. He kept it there as they walked out of the classroom and into the hallway. Rather than walking in the direction he normally went to have Sam follow, though, Luc began in the direction that Sam normally went. To the men's dormitories.

"Don't you have—?"

"I didn't think you'd want to sit through an hour-long Business Law lesson with me, and frankly I don't think I'd be able to pay attention if you were there, so I'm heading to my dorm instead," explained Luc, his voice smooth, bordering on impatient (it would have sounded that way, anyway, if he was talking to anyone but Sam).

Dorm.

 _Luc's_  dorm.

Oh yes.

Two weeks of their relationship and Luc hadn't even suggested it yet, all because he was waiting for Sam to initiate it. That was strangely sweet.

They didn't enter the room the same way they had first both gone into Sam's—kissing frantically and almost-heavy petting, but instead normally, Luc throwing his bag down by the door and Sam following suit, then looking up—

"Woah."

Even if he hadn't known that no one was quite like Luc, he could have easily seen from the room that two people with vastly differing personalities (or interests, at least) lived there. There might as well have been tape separating the room in half.

Adjacent to one of the beds was a small bookshelf, and on the surrounding ground were more books that hadn't been able to fit—at least twenty of them, plus another two books sitting on the pillow of that bed. The blankets were nowhere close to being neat, and there were scattered papers on the floor as well as on the desk that faced the wall on that side. On the other side, everything was immaculate—the bed was made as though by a freaking  _maid_  (Sam hadn't even known Stanford students to be that clean), everything on the desk was aligned perfectly, and he swore that if he looked close enough he could see a line in the center of the room that separated where dust was and wasn't.

"I'm guessing that one's yours," Sam deadpanned, gesturing to the messy, book-filled side. He couldn't imagine Luc being a neat-freak, or having an expensive-looking bed and desk and all those old, antique-ish mini-statues and books that were on it.

Rather than answering directly, Luc smiled at him and sat down on the edge. "What do you think?"

Walking over, Sam picked up a book from the top of the pile that was on the floor and read the title: " _Lord of the Flies_." He smiled and glanced down, noticing that most of the other books seemed to be classics as well— _Grapes of Wrath_ ,  _Call of Cthulu_ ,  _Tale of Despereaux_ …. And then tons of Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle and Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Sam found himself suddenly extremely fond of Luc and impressed by his collection, and then turned to him with a grin.

"You didn't tell me you liked reading this much," he said, setting down the book in his hand to exactly where he'd found it and ambling over to sit next to him on the bed.

"I have a lot of free time." Luc's face remained calm and impassive as ever but for the upward quirk at the edge of his mouth.

"Most college students don't appreciate the classics. Not this much, anyway."

"I like them better than modern stories," he explained. "Most classics revolve around some trait of human nature and old allegories. They get right down to the direct, crass truth of it."

Sam loved how unexpectedly intelligent Luc actually was. If he wanted to be, Luc could probably end up as the next Plato or Einstein—the only thing was that he doubted the man would put his mind toward helping others or even good in general and that he also just didn't want to. And somehow that didn't bother him in the least bit.

On that tangent, Sam practically forgot all about what he'd been looking forward to all week and continued with their intelligent discussion rather than leaning in or touching Luc any further south than his forearm. Everything Luc had to say, Sam felt burrow inside his opinions that he'd already formed about life and begin to change them.

_You don't have to think just like him to be with him, Sam._

But everything he said about human nature made so much sense, even if it was a bit more morbid than how Sam was used to thinking.

"I hate humanity," said Luc at one point, looking at the wall almost wistfully with his hands hanging loosely in between his lap. "Even the part of it that's me, though not quite as much. Humans are the worst thing that's ever happened to the world."

He turned his head and Sam could tell that Luc could read his expression and knew what he was thinking:  _Even me?_  Sam wasn't sure how he felt about whether he thought that of him or not.

"Never you, Sammy. Everything and everyone else I feel like I walk right over and I want to tear it all down, but you… well, you're too tall to walk over, for one." A wry smirk—whether it was for his own cleverness or because of his fondness for him, Sam couldn't tell—stretched across his face as he straightened himself up and became face-level with him, wrapping his arms around Sam's shoulders. "I just want to build you up. I feel like even if I tried, you're the one thing in the world that I couldn't break—and I would never try."

That last word was caught in Sam's breath, for not a single second passed between Luc's explanation and their lips being pressed together. With the way he returned the kiss and pulled him deep into it by the neck, Sam told him that yes, he was succeeding at what he wanted to do, he  _was indeed_  building him up.

Contrary to what he'd assumed that would turn to, Luc pulled away after less than a minute and looked at Sam with an expression that made it seem as though none of that had just happened.

"Are you hungry?"

It made Sam want to laugh, and then he  _was_  laughing, pulling Luc in by the shirt for another, brief kiss. "If you want to eat, sure."

And just like that, Luc was up and off the bed, rummaging in the freezer and pulling out a—Sam had to get up to get a closer look and make sure he'd seen it right—Lean Cuisine. A fucking  _Lean Cuisine_.

Before Luc could ask him if that was what he wanted, Sam was standing by the freezer and frowning down into it.

"How the  _Hell_  can you afford all this?" he asked as though it were the most perplexing thing in the world, to Luc's amusement. "My dorm is full of microwave pizzas and generic granola bars and those fucking Cup O' Noodles-things, and you've got all this expensive brand-name stuff—"

"That would be because of me," said a voice that didn't belong to Luc, and which was accompanied by the opening  _creak_  and closing  _slam_  of a door. It was distinctly gruff and British, and when Sam looked up and saw him, he found himself not surprised at all that that was the man who owned everything on the other side of the room.

His dark, neatly gelled hair and suit that looked far too professional for a student, as well as the accent, set off an air of arrogance and entirely a lack of morals about him—the same kind you would sense around a businessman or politician. Sam straightened up (to see him better, not necessarily to size him up—though he did feel that he ended up doing that anyway) and looked him in the eye, actually feeling wary about introducing himself. Though it seemed he didn't have to because—

"This is the moose you've been talking about, I presume?" said the man, glancing to Luc and raising an eyebrow at Sam. He walked slowly to the center of the room in a way that seemed like a boss at a meeting and shrugged his coat off.

Luc rolled his eyes and sighed, then turned around to face the both of them. His expression read:  _done_. And likely,  _I hate introducing people._

"Sam Winchester, my extremely attractive and tall boyfriend," he began, gesturing to him. "And Fergus MacLeod, my insufferably British roommate—"

There was a sudden, loud thunk of Fergus's boot stomping on the floor, and Sam nearly didn't believe he could even stomp that loud. "I've told you a thousand times over, my name is  _Crowley_! Would it bloody  _kill_  you to respect that?"

Luc ignored him and turned back around to the freezer, and Sam figured he and Fergus/Crowley would take that as a yes. "Just take whatever you want. There's tons of stuff."

Since he normally didn't feel right just taking other people's food (it was one of those things he'd been taught at a child and actually  _stayed_ with him during the drugs and rehab), Sam hesitated to step forward and did feel awkward about it—but then it occurred to him that if they could afford  _all this_ , one missing chicken pot pie wasn't going to matter to them.

"What did he mean it was because of him?" Sam thought to ask as Luc took the pie and put it in the microwave sitting on the table, remembering what Fergus—Crowley—whatever—had said.

"I come from a relatively wealthy family and make a substantial amount of money from my job," responded the man in question, who seemed irked that Sam hadn't asked him directly.

"Which is…?" Sam didn't want to seem nosy, but there weren't many jobs a college student would get that would enable them to afford decent food. Both Crowley and Luc seemed to be amused to hear that question.

"I…  _do_  things for people." For a moment it seemed like he was going to stop there, as though that was a completely clear answer. But then he began explaining like he was advertising his services. "People tell me what they want and I use my connections to make that thing happen, and then they pay me accordingly. For example—just yesterday I managed to get someone's leg broken in a hit-and-run just so my client could replace them on the KU football team. I never do refunds, though, and I never help the same client twice."

That sounded despicable yet interesting. Sam had to ask, though—"Why not?"

"Because more than half of them would end up wanting a refund if I didn't tell them there were none before the deal is made, and because I want a fair playing field among possible opposing clients. Those more-than-half I mentioned wouldn't want me a second time, anyway."

Yeah. Definitely despicable. "And you're just  _so_  nice that you share what you earn from your 'job' with Luc?" Sam asked in disbelief, his voice and body language heavy with sass.

"He shares with me because if he doesn't," Luc cut in, pausing to take Sam's pot pie out of the microwave, "I'll tell everyone that his real name is Fergus. Even the college doesn't know, and if they found out he'd gotten in under 'Crowley' rather than his real name, he'd be expelled and probably also arrested for reasons that would take too long to list. And now you're wondering how  _I_  found out—which is because I knew him in high school. Is that all of the story or is there more?" he added, looking to Fergus and giving him a shit-eating grin.

"You've told him quite enough," he growled, stepping jerkily toward the freezer—but not before Luc could slam it shut.

"Go eat at a restaurant or something. Sam and I want the room alone tonight." There was an implied  _"You know what'll happen otherwise"_ hanging over him, Sam could tell. Fergus gave him a death glare before snatching up his coat and putting it back on.

"Fine," he said shortly, heading toward the door already. "I better not come back next morning and find that you've done it on my bed."  _Slam._

A few seconds of silence passed, in which Sam chewed a forkful of the pot pie and felt slightly awkward.

"I hate Crowley," Luc said flatly, pulling his own food out of the microwave now.

Sam frowned curiously, starting to really hate this whole name-confusion thing. "I thought—his real name's Fergus, and you—"

"Personally, I do think the name Crowley suits him better, but he hates being called Fergus, so I only do it to his face."

Well. It seemed logical and spiteful enough.

Now that Luc's roommate was gone, though, Sam really didn't want to talk about him anymore. Or anybody other than either of them. He wanted this night for  _just_  them. Even the microwaveable dinner and light conversation was nice and perfectly enough for him at the moment.

Soon enough they were on the bed again, finishing off their food and sitting close. Luc's hand stroked back and forth on Sam's thigh, and his hand rested on the bone that jutted out at Luc's hip. Sam finished the pot pie first, and once the other man was finished with his dinner, there was a noticeable amount of sauce left on his face.

Judging by his smirk, Sam was pretty sure he'd done that on purpose, but he also didn't care because it was highly effective in getting him to set his trash aside (on the floor, as Luc had done with his own plastic tray) and lean forward to lick it off. And then he was kissing him, not caring about the consequences of doing this on a (sort-of) full stomach, fisting Luc's hair and feeling the same happen to his own.

It was so much different doing this on a bed rather than the grass—so much better, too. Sam could lean so far forward that he pushed Luc comfortably onto his back, and there was no pausing because there weren't any people who might have been watching, so it was with fluid, even motions that they let their hands travel everywhere and positioned themselves on the bed.

Their movements became a little jerkier when Luc made to unbutton Sam's shirt and Sam sat up to just pull Luc's straight off—as did their breaths and moans. Once Sam could feel Luc's erection hard against his thigh, he threw his arms tight around him and flipped them over so that Luc was above him.

Luc immediately let out a heavy breath of surprise and, opening his eyes all the way, Sam saw utter  _worship_  in the man's eyes.

" _I want you to ride me_ ," Sam breathed, feeling his brain go hazy, and Luc nodded, easing up a bit so Sam could pull himself up to the headboard so that he was halfway-sitting.

Hips continued to roll and there was nothing but heat, and then pants came off and there was yet more heat between them, Sam didn't know how he hadn't burst yet. Sitting up all the way, he allowed room for their cocks to slide together as he held Luc around the waist and kissed all over his neck and chest, and he wanted to keep going because the way Luc moaned his name at the sudden feel of Sam's tongue over his nipple was so  _addicting_.

But Lucifer finally pulled both of their pairs of underwear off and pushed Sam back down and reached under the bed for a bottle of lube that he'd evidently had ready just for this, and began preparing himself. Sam nearly came right there just  _watching_  him do it, and it took all the willpower in the world to not start pumping himself to get some relief or to sit up and push Luc on his back to do it himself.

"You sure, Sam?" Luc half-moaned as he inched up and held himself right over the cock of the man below him. There was no actual concern in his face—it was as though he was simply programmed to make sure he had complete consent.

" _Fuck yes_."

He sank down onto Sam's cock and Sam thrust upward, moaning in relief, and pulled Luc down.

It was so  _amazing_  just to know that he was inside Luc, and that he wanted him inside him so badly. He was all Sam wanted—and Sam wanted all of him. He kept varying but always-firm grips on him—on Luc's hips when he was lying back submissively, on his waist when he wanted to suck on his collarbone to return the pleasure, and on his neck when he pulled him in for sloppy, hot kisses on the mouth.

When they were both close, Sam sat as straight as he could and kept one well-toned arm tightly around Luc's back, the other in between them to pump him into orgasm. He felt vaguely glad that he'd done that research because he was pretty sure he wouldn't have learned this all so easily on his own.

" _Sa_ —"

Luc couldn't finish his name because he bit down on Sam's shoulder on instinct the moment he reached his climax, digging his fingernails deep into his back.

In the next couple seconds, Sam felt Luc tighten around him and came with a growl of " _Fuck, Lucifer…._ "

His thrusts slowed to a stop to ride it out just as their breathing did, and without quite realizing how or being very aware of it, they were both soon lying straight-out on the bed. Luc was halfway on top of him and aggressively wrapped around him, breathing into Sam's neck until his heart and lungs calmed down. Sam wrapped his arms around him as well, and they tightened when Luc used the last of his energy before falling straight to sleep to press a kiss to his neck.


	5. We're all impure to Mormons

Sam wondered if now was a good time to call Dean and tell him that he'd met someone. Sure, there was the possibility that his brother would berate him for getting in a relationship so quickly when he knew it wasn't a particularly good idea to do that—but then Sam could just remind him of how spontaneous love was and hold the whole Cas thing over him.

On Sunday morning, he lay in bed and thought about it, breathing in deep and turning over his phone in his hand. Next to Lucifer, Dean was the most important person in his life—

 _What._  No. Where did that even come from? Next to Dean, Lucifer was the most important thing in his life, is how that thought should have gone. Wait, no—there was also Cas and Bobby, who were his family and who had been there for him for years, long before he'd even met Lucifer. As much as his boyfriend helped him to just feel  _solid_ , he'd only known him for a few weeks. Dean could probably help ground him just as well if he were here.

And he was sure his brother considered him the most important thing in his life, even more than Cas. Or maybe equal to Cas. Really, he would have been fine with that. Sam wouldn't have been jealous of Dean's love projecting more strongly towards his husband than to his brother. But somehow he didn't think Dean would be fine with that fact whether it applied to him or Sam.

Either way. Throughout his childhood, he'd told everything to Dean—when he got a scrape from falling on the pavement, when he got sick, when he got a girlfriend… even the first time he'd gotten a boner and been confused. And now that he'd been through rehab, he was sure Dean would be more worried about his little brother than ever, so completely aside from giving him news about his life, he really ought to have heard from him.

So he made his decision and sat up straight, and Sam didn't hesitate to press the contact that said  _Dean_  on the screen this time.

It rang for a full thirty seconds before there was a voice on the other end.

"Sammy?" Dean's voice sounded extremely relieved, like he hadn't even been sure whether Sam was alive or not. Either that or exhausted from work.

"Hey, Dean." Honestly, Sam was pretty glad to hear him, too.

"I was planning on checking up on you soon," he said gruffly through the phone, and Sam could tell by the background noises of tinkering metal that Dean was fixing up a car at the junkyard, probably with Bobby or another friend. "So, how are you liking college? Again, I mean. And I guess it's actually totally different because it's not  _genius_  college—"

"It's going great," Sam cut him off before he could start rambling on too much. "Yeah, it's an average college, but at least I'm not surrounded by people who only got in because their family was rich and generally assholes. And there  _are_  plenty of other people who are smart but—uh, didn't have opportunities…." Yeah, that was the best way to put it. He didn't feel like bringing up drugs, though he felt like Dean might.

"I know it's gotta be hard not taking Stanford Law anymore, though," said Dean, his voice full of sympathy. "But hey, all that you've gone through, and you're still doin' better than me—I had to start taking classes at a community college, and I'm still in the middle of them, so. Yeah. What else is going on? How's the social life? Or are books your only friends again?"

The laugh that Dean made at his own joke was refreshing, and Sam chuckled in response.

"Contrary to popular belief, even the high school version of me had tons of friends. So you can shut your face. And it's not like I  _forgot_ how to have a social life, Dean…. I've actually made several friends so far this year, for the record. And I, well. I met someone."

There was a distinct pause which could easily have been Dean silently celebrating for him just as much as him being disappointed. "Already?"

"Listen, Dean, I know what you're thinking—and what my therapist from rehab would be thinking, but—"

"Nah, Sam, it's fine. I don't buy into that 'dependency issues' crap," Dean reassured him not-so-convincingly. "Okay, yeah, it's probably a legitimate thing, but I don't think it's that huge of a problem if someone can make you happy as long as they're not giving you drugs or any shit like that. So… are you gonna tell me about her?"

Sam smiled, glad he didn't mind—or at least pretended not to mind. "His name's Luc and he keeps me grounded, Dean," he told him with a deep, rich sigh, and he most certainly didn't miss the slight noise of surprise on Dean's side that it was a man. "I honestly don't know how I'd be doing if I hadn't met him."

He wasn't going to mention the extreme feeling of emptiness he had when Luc wasn't around, though, nor was he going to tell Dean how he had even voluntarily missed a class for him.

"That's real good, Sammy," he said after a moment, and Sam could tell Dean was genuinely happy for him. "You need someone like that. Hold onto him so Cas and I can meet him over Christmas, alright?"

"Of course." He didn't intend to leave Luc, well, ever, as far as things looked at the moment, really. Sam  _had_  felt a connection—the kind that just wasn't meant to break—already, but hey, he was in his twenties, and he knew that things could change. But if this thing he had with Luc ever broke off, it wouldn't be for a while, he could tell.

"Just makes sure he treats you right."

"I know, Dean."

"And tell me if he doesn't—"

"Goddamn, Dean, I'm not your little baby brother anymore—I'm your younger, but taller and in fact  _more_  physically able brother. I can take care of myself. Besides, Luc would never. He…"  _Loves me_?  _Is obsessed with me_?  _Builds me up_? "He really cares about me. I can tell. He's not like Ruby." Not completely, anyway. But not quite like anyone else he'd ever met, either.

"I'd hope not," Dean said with a somewhat breathy and sad-sounding laugh. "Well, um—I should get back to working on the car. Call me more often, okay? Whenever you get the chance or when you need me." The words  _I've kind of missed you, man_ , were seeping right through Dean's tone.

Sam let out a short sigh. "Sure thing. See you."

It still felt extremely refreshing to have finally talked to Dean for the first time in nearly a month, Sam thought as he ended the call and set his phone beside him. But he couldn't shake the thoughts that talking to his own brother hadn't had nearly the same effect that Luc did.

* * *

"Holy shit, Sam—what happened?"

"Hm?" Sam turned around, still shirtless and holding the button-up he'd been about to put on.

Adam was walking out of the shower and still drying himself off with the towel (he had underwear on, though, a courtesy Sam was glad for because of Dean's habit to not care about decency), and wearing a slightly concerned expression. He hadn't been in there long, since it was Monday morning, as in when it was Sam's turn to shower first, and Sam took the long showers. So Adam had to hurry up if he didn't want it to run cold.

"Your back," he said, circling around Sam to get a better look at it as the man in question reached an arm back to feel it—" _Oh_."

They both simultaneously realized what that all was about, and Sam laughed in a bit of embarrassment.

"Like it rough, do you?" Adam teased, his look of shock easily blending into a snarky grin as he walked over to the closet to grab some clothes. "Or Luc does, at least."

Sam had nothing to say to that, so he just grimaced and pulled his shirt on to hide the marks so nothing more could be said.

Saturday morning had been one of waking up with a sticky stomach but not caring, limbs tangled together as Luc had calmly and slowly traced his fingers over each of the small scars he'd created by digging his fingernails into Sam's upper back. His fingernails weren't even long (nor were they properly trimmed, though), and yet he had dug them so hard that there were dark red lines where there had either just been _so_  much pressure on his skin that the indents were still there, or blood had seeped through and created a thin line of dried, beaded blood. Surrounding each of the scars was still darkened skin, as the pressure from his fingers had created bruises, too.

" _Goddamn_ ," Sam had seethed when he'd first felt his upper back after realizing it hurt slightly to move his arms. "Those aren't going away too soon."

Luc had sat up behind him and lazily yet somehow still possessively wrapped his arms around Sam's waist. He'd laid a soft kiss to the tip of Sam's spine and then one over each of the scars before brushing his fingers over all of them. He'd been touching those marks like they were the most beautiful thing in the world.

"Good," Luc had told him, his voice then muffled by the skin of Sam's back under his lips once again.

And then later Crowley had come back to find them still unclothed and ants crawling over the empty Lean Cuisine tray that was sitting on the floor, at which his  _ultimately pissed_  expression had been priceless.

Sam didn't care that Adam knew, really. In fact, he wouldn't have minded if everyone knew. Let everyone see what a night he'd had and that Lucifer Morgan had done that to him. They were like trophies to wear and show off.

_More like a ranch-owners' branding._

Nah, Sam had done it willingly, so no. It wasn't. He didn't even feel like arguing with the voice at this point, either.

Ever since that night (or since the morning-after?), Luc had become obsessed with marking him. Every time they kissed, even if it was only the hello-kiss that they shared at the beginning of every Greek Mythology lesson, he insisted on nipping his lip if only a bit. Not enough to break skin or even to hurt, but just a harder-than-usual tug. It was starting to make a soft spot on the left corner of Sam's bottom lip.

And anytime they had the chance to do anything more than a chaste kiss, whether in one of their dorms or outside or in an empty classroom, Luc was anything but discreet. He hadn't said anything directly to Sam about it, but he could tell by the way the man loved to do this all of a sudden that that was the reason.

In early October, they found themselves frequenting the campus Starbucks, at least twice a week, when they spent time together—a couple times even during classes that they should have been attending. What was a couple skipped lessons, anyway, to time with Luc?

They almost always ended up neglecting to pay tips because Luc didn't like to pay more money than necessary despite that he had more than enough and it wasn't even his money—and Sam had only been able to override his influences the first few times and put in a 10% tip. And they were sure that was the reason the barista always gave them a dirty look when they walked in and sat in their usual spot. He couldn't refuse to serve them, though, as tips were merely a custom and by no means mandatory.

Sam felt bad at first. But after a week or so he realized that he'd stopped genuinely caring. It was kind of that guy's fault anyway for ending up as a barista, and most certainly not Sam's.

This had become a sort of constant with him and Luc, but that was strange in itself because Luc was anything but constant. He didn't keep things to routine and he almost seemed to be allergic to making things orderly. He made decisions on impulse and he said irrelevant things out of nowhere. But with their coffee time together, he seemed to be okay with that happening regularly.

Even where they sat was the same. Sam supposed it was a possessive thing with Luc—to him, it really was  _his_  seat. A week ago they'd come in to find someone else sitting in that small booth, and Luc had practically spilled his coffee on her purposely to get her to get up and leave before Sam grabbed his wrist to stop him. The woman had ended up grabbing her smoothie and getting up angrily (or scared), and Sam had apologized to her, but Luc had still been angry about her afterward. And he'd shown it by shoving his hand down Sam's pants and keeping it there, with Sam getting steadily more sexually frustrated, for an hour.

Now, however, the place was calm with a few other college students, either on their laptops or with friends, and the barista glared at Luc for a slightly shorter time than usual as they got their drinks.

They sat down on one side of the booth with Sam next to the window and Luc closer to him than was necessary—not that he minded. Refusing to have much space in between them when they sat was just one of Luc's things. He seemed to almost always needed to have a hand on Sam's thigh, to keep them chained together.

For the moment, though, Luc had both hands on his coffee cup, and brow was furrowed intently as he drank it. This seemed to happen every time he drank coffee, and each time, Sam leaned on his hand and watched him with an amused smile.

"Do you really like the taste of coffee that much?" he finally decided to ask, a small laugh in his voice.

"It's not the taste," Luc said in all seriousness as he pulled away from the cup, still frowning and licking his lips, both hands around the base of the cup. "I actually think it tastes disgusting. It's how it feels when it goes down my throat, like it's filling me with something."

"Yeah," Sam laughs, "caffeine."

"No, something else. I'm not sure what you would call it. It's old and powerful and probably kind of  _wrong_. " Luc paused, taking another gulp of it, and setting it down. When he looked over to Sam, he was no longer frowning, but instead looked his usual, charming self. "Did you know Mormons believe coffee is a sin?"

"Mormons believe everything is a sin."

"Except polygamy."

Giggling, they both grinned at each other and then brought their cups to their mouths to end it on a non-awkward transition. It was the easiest thing at hand.

This time, it was Sam who leaned forward and slid his hand over Luc's thigh to hold on. He breathed deep and loud, and then asked: "Do you do things just because other people think it's a sin?"

Luc smirked and let his eyes travel slowly and obviously down to Sam's lips. "Sometimes," he muttered, leaning in and meeting him in a soft kiss. It broke and he grabbed Sam's face, pulling him in to press another kiss, and another, and another. He told him quietly in between kisses: "Some people think  _this_  is wrong." Kiss. "I love that." Kiss. Another kiss. "I love being above their opinions." Slow, drawn-out kiss. "I love being considered..." Kiss and a brush of tongue. "... _impure_." Kiss. "I think you do too, Sammy."

His mind automatically went to the drugs, to Ruby and all the things he did with her and how  _wrong_  it all was and how that fact alone had made it amazing. Sam faltered for a moment, as though he was snapping out of something or having some sort of revelation, but before it could pull through, he was sucked right back into the kiss and the bliss of  _not caring_.

 _Yeah, I do,_  he thought, and surprisingly, it didn't feel like it was someone else's thoughts or simply someone else putting that thought in his head. It was all Sam. And his voice of reason said nothing.

Luc leaning them against the back of the seat and the feeling of leather on his cheek jolted Sam into reality—he remembered that they were inside a coffeeshop, that is. Doing things that intimate (it wasn't the kissing itself, but rather the meaning behind it) was awkward where other people could see, and Sam felt suddenly exposed and naked.

Which was actually quite thrilling. They might have been told to leave at any moment, or harassed by some homophobic person. The idea of conflict was actually one they looked forward to. Of course, they'd kissed plenty of times there before, but never really like this, the way they did before ending up in bed together.

Luc's mouth left his and slid down to his neck, at which Sam said lowly, "We're in a coffeeshop."

It wasn't a warning, or even worried at all—it was simply a reminder, with a hint of a laugh.

"I know," he whispered against Sam's neck before latching back on to the spot he'd chosen, licking and sucking hard. Sam was vaguely aware that he'd chosen a fairly visible place to give him a hickey, and for that he was more aroused than he was annoyed.

The arousal went a bit away, though, when his eyes fluttered ever so slightly open to the sight of Amelia and a girl he'd never met before walking towards him with looks of shock. Well, Amelia's was of shock, at least—the other girl was likely just surprised to see two men furiously making out inside a public place.

Sam's mouth dropped involuntarily of pleasure from Luc's mouth still on his neck, and it stayed that way out of surprise. Stiffening and tightening his fingers around Luc's shirt to pull him off, he stared, waiting for the worst.

"...Oh," was all she had to say as she hesitantly stopped in front of the table. Just  _oh_. She didn't have to look either of them up and down to realize exactly what was going on and what had been happening for a while. "I didn't—"

"Yeah," Sam said quickly, feeling something halfway in between regret and awkwardness. This wasn't how he'd wanted her to find out, _goddammit_... He should have just told her about Luc before.

"This explains a lot," she said quickly, swallowing. "I'll just, uh, leave."

As she did just that, Luc didn't hesitate to move straight back to sucking on that spot on Sam's neck again—and this time he sucked as hard as he could.

" _Jesus_ —what—?"

"You never told her about me," he mumbled, his voice muffled by Sam's neck and his own lips. "Do you feel sorry for her?"

Sam knew he was referring to Amelia's (possibly still prevalent) crush on him, and the truthful answer came crashing up against his chest like a brick inside of him, and then out his mouth: "No, I don't."

Seconds of silence later, Luc loosened his mouth off of Sam's neck and leaned back to admire the dark purple bruise just above his collar. He ran a thumb over it and smiled with pride, and then looked up at the man he'd just marked.

"I didn't think it was any of her business," explained Sam. "And she never really asked. How many people have you told?"

"Besides Crowley?" he smirked, shifting himself so that they were sitting relatively normally again. "No one. Unless you count everyone who's found out on their own from seeing us."

With that, he glanced down to Sam's neck again, and there was a distinct flash in his eyes. Sam caught it and gave him a smirk of his own before arching his neck down and pressing his lips fiercely to Luc's again, then to his cheek, to his jaw, and finally to his neck, where he found a spot that Luc's muscles strained the most under and latched on. He felt the vibrations from Luc smiling and humming under his lips and smiled back.

No one ended up telling them to leave.

* * *

Sam was simultaneously afraid and hopeful that Amelia would take the very visible hickey on his neck as a personal attack.

When she noticed it, though, she simply gave him a wry smirk and said, "I have concealer that can help you cover it up, if you want."

"I'm not in high school anymore," he said with a relieved laugh, absentmindedly touching a couple fingers to the mark. "I don't have anyone to hide it from." In fact, he meant to do the exact opposite. And he was nearly about to say that to Amelia when he stopped himself.

"Sure, but isn't it kind of... I dunno, identifying? Or embarrassing at all, like people are seeing a personal part of you?" She didn't seem too genuinely concerned—more like she was just looking for something to talk about to ease the mood before getting into what she obviously _really_  wanted to talk about. Sam decided not to keep her waiting and sighed.

"Listen, I'm sorry you had to find out by catching us—"

"What? Sam, it's fine—no one  _cares_  that you're gay," she assured him with a small shake of her head and hand gestures in an attempt to dispel his assumptions. And he had to say, she was a fairly good actor.

"Amy, you know what I mean," he said seriously, and he noticed her expression pull back at the sudden lack of ease. Sam didn't think he looked at all scary—just not as consoling or sympathetic as he might have been. "I should have told you I was in a relationship."

For a moment, she frowned at him, and then her face evened out as she deadpanned, "So you knew the whole time that I wanted to date you."

Sam waited for the guilt to come, but he only actually felt it in a very vague way. So he just made an awkward expression. "...Yeah. Sorry."

"Nah, don't be," she sighed, though looking slightly annoyed and folding her arms. "And I guess I kind of understand why you didn't just tell me that you liked guys. Kansas isn't exactly the most pro-LGBT place."

At that point, it wasn't even circumstantial or irrational neglect that made Sam not mention the fact that he wasn't actually gay. It was a conscious decision because it was just easier to let Amelia think that the only reason he wasn't interested was because he only liked men, rather than that he was normally attracted to women but just not her. He just nodded and looked down awkwardly in response.

"So," she said suddenly, her voice higher and clearly trying to make the mood light-hearted now. "You and Luc. Were you guys a thing when he showed up at the Roadhouse?"

"Well—yeah, kind of," he decided to say. Of course he wasn't going to try to explain that Luc had potentially followed him there and that they'd been flirting all week and also sort of groping each other sometimes. Even he was still kind of confused as to what to call that stage of their relationship.

"Yeah, that explains more," she said flatly. "Come on, let's go get our shitty cafeteria lunch."

* * *

Entirely by coincidence and with no real correlation whatsoever, it was only a few days afterward that Sam decided he ought to get a job. He had a substantial amount of money to live off of (only if he just bought generic college-kid food, though), but it was always nice to have money of his own. Besides, he would need to save up money for his books for next year and the eventual apartment for when he was finished with college.

"You don't really need a job," Luc said when he told him, lying down on Sam's bed with him and stretching. "I can just tell Crowley to give you an allowance along with what he gives me and you won't have to work at all, just like I don't."

Sam sat up and frowned. "Nah, I can't do that. I want to work for my money," he told him assuredly, one hand on Luc's chest. "It's just, um—a thing I have about favors. I can't take what I don't think I deserve."

Looking down at him, he could practically  _see_  Luc thinking about it, as though the thought bubble was right there. And then he sat up as well.

"Yeah, I can respect that," said Luc, smiling warmly and inching closer so that he could wrap his arms around Sam's waist and put his chin on his shoulder. "Though if I gave you money, I can think of ways that you could work for it..."

Understanding the innuendo immediately, Sam broke into a short laugh and turned his head to kiss him. "What have we not done yet that you'd want me to do?" he couldn't help but ask. He was only partially joking.

Luc paused a moment to think. "Bondage. Food play. I don't know, I'd think of something."

Both of those ideas actually did excite him, and he barely realized it when he twisted around in Luc's grip and pressed him back down into the bed with a relatively short, but deep kiss. When he pulled away to look him in the face, he found Luc's raised eyebrow and half-smirk, saying _You really want to do those, don't you?_

"I'm still getting a job," he responded, pressing down on him again.

* * *

He was expecting to have to apply for some job in town, due to on-campus jobs generally being pretty full by a month into the semester, but luck seemed to be going in Sam's direction that week.

As soon as he'd mentioned to Gary that he was going to look for a job, he was greeted with extremely convenient news:

"Ooh—I think there's openings in the campus library, actually. I work there and one of the other guys quit last week. For some reason not a lot of people want the job..."

"Woah, that's—that's actually great! Is it on the weekend or...?"

"Well, the person who quit was on the Monday-through-Wednesday evening shift, so."

Because Gary liked him and the librarians liked Gary, Sam was able to get the job pretty much confirmed for him without them even needing to have met Sam first. He walked straight into the library and behind the desk next Monday and they welcomed him as though relieved.

"You'll be putting away all the returned books and of course answering anyone's questions if you can," they told him. "Matthew can show you where everything is."

Only one other guy worked on that shift with him, and he was relatively okay to talk to when there was nothing else to do but put books on shelves and talk in low voices to pass the time. But otherwise, Matthew wouldn't exactly have been Sam's first choice for a friend—his current tendencies to gravitate towards people like Lucifer aside, even. He talked too much about his passion for bugs and didn't seem to realize that no one  _cared_.

Once Sam told Luc where he was working now, Luc made an effort to visit him most nights that he worked. It was quite the relief not only from his patience-exhausting conversations with Matthew, but also from the work that went late, often even past one in the morning.

The first time Luc visited him at work, he walked up to the desk as though he was any other student and asked Sam where the psychology books were, complete with his lazy grin and hooded eyes and a stance with his elbows locked and hands on the desk that made Sam want to lean over and kiss him, which he did and for which he received a sharp, surprised (but not necessarily _dirty_ ) look from Matthew.

And he did start to tell him where the section was, but then he broke off and said, "You know what, I'll just show you personally."

Making out against bookshelves was a uniquely thrilling experience that Sam wasn't sure why he'd never tried it before. Although Luc was actually concerned about backing up against them too hard so as not to damage them, which Sam found extremely endearing.

"Did you actually want to look for psychology books or were you planning this the whole time?" Sam breathed onto Luc's neck as he kissed down his jaw, trying, by Luc's request, not to push him too hard into the shelves.

"Both," he whispered, and Sam could feel him grin by the movement of his neck under his lips.

Another minute and Sam had an overwhelming urge to yank both of their pants down and just get them off right there in front of the books—which he might actually have done if Matthew hadn't walked into the aisle right as he had his hand over the crotch of Luc's pants.

They both stopped, though Luc kept his arms around Sam's back and made no movement to pull away but instead tightened his grip and turned his head to look at the kid, a mock-innocent smirk on his face. Sam didn't move away either, but merely stood there awkwardly and waited.

"It looks like he found the psychology books," Matthew said stiffly, glaring at them and clearly trying not to notice their matching semis. "So you can actually come  _do your work_ with me, Sam."

At Matthew's impatient look, Luc glared, looking genuinely and coldly angry, and Sam noticed that before anything else.

"You can't tell him what to do like that—"

"Luc, it's fine," Sam assured him, pulling back and straightening his clothes a bit for him. His eyes searched Lucifer's expression and found not-so-latent jealousy and what looked like contained rage. But only for a few seconds, until he grabbed the man's face and gave him a soft kiss, at which the anger faded in his eyes. It wasn't quite gone, though; it was still there, deep in the back. "I gotta go back to work. You study or read or whatever you're doing, and I'll come back when my shift is over."

When he walked off with Matthew, he took care to walk faster so that he was ahead of him and wouldn't need to listen to everything he was obviously going to say—and yet he still managed to hiss after him in a loud whisper, " _You should probably go to the bathroom_."

After that, Luc came nearly every day that Sam worked whether he actually needed a book or not (then again, he did love to read, so there was something for him to do either way), and he always made a point to piss off Matthew. Either by taking up Sam's time or by kissing him deeply right at the desk where the man could see and was pretty much forced to watch.

It was evident to Sam that they hated each other. Which he was fine with, as he was even beginning to dislike Matthew more and more—and frankly, jealousy and possessiveness was extremely attractive on Luc. Monday through Wednesday nights became the ones that most often ended with them in bed and of course, by extension, Crowley or Adam angry about either being locked out of their room or finding Sam and Luc wrapped up naked in each other.

So soon enough, they started settling for closets and empty classrooms—and once, even, up against the bookshelves when Sam had a notably late shift and practically no one else, not even Matthew (due to being sick), was in the library. Lucifer didn't have a problem soiling the books in the  _Teen Supernatural Romance_  section, and Sam was all too happy to face the shelf and let Luc take him from behind where any of the late-studying students or even a staff member might have walked in and seen them. He climaxed all over  _Breaking Dawn_  and didn't bother to clean it off.

When someone found it a few days later during Sam's shift and let out a screech of pure disgust, he fought the urge to smirk.

* * *

"So I hear your boyfriend is being a great big bag of dicks again," said Adam casually as they carried their laundry down to the washing machine room of the dormitory.

Sam whipped his head around so fast that anyone behind him would have had their face sliced open by his hair and glared, anger flaring up in his chest. Several questions and other things jumped up his throat to say, so it took him a moment to decide which one:

"From who?"

"From  _whom_ ," Adam corrected with a smug grin, and Sam glared deeper, so he stopped. "Samandriel. You know—the guy I work with. Matthew is his little brother."

At that, Sam's glare twisted into a scowl, and he nearly stopped in his tracks and dropped the basket of dirty laundry right there.

"Seriously? And you're gonna listen to Matt's side of it?" he said accusingly, his voice one of more annoyance he remembered having in a long time. "I think he just doesn't like that Luc's a guy." That was a half-lie—he was completely aware of why Matthew didn't like Luc, but there was also no evidence to say that the guy wasn't homophobic.

"Or maybe he doesn't like you  _literally_  fucking around on the job," Adam didn't even care to mutter, but rather said clear as day, and with annoyance added to his tone now, as well. They'd made it to the washing machines, and Adam set his basket down before continuing. "Can't Luc leave you alone for just ten fucking minutes? Because this kind of looks like he's controlling you or something, and—"

"First off," Sam cut in, slamming his basket down and pointing an angry finger at Adam's face, "there was never any proof that we did anything past kissing in the library. So what if we made out a bit while I was working? It's not like I haven't been getting the work  _done_."

Adam's expression turned to exasperation. "Okay, assuming you haven't spent more of your time working than you have pushing your boyfriend up against the books, I guess I can't blame you for sex on the job, but  _really_ , man—Luc's really throwing me off. He wants your attention all the fucking time—"

"Yeah, and I  _like_  paying attention to him."

"And yesterday I saw him walk by a girl who dropped all her stuff and looked like she was gonna cry and he even looked straight at her but then just  _kept walking_ —and okay, you know what?—I'm pretty sure he stole money from my wallet, too. There's a whole fifty bucks missing and unless  _you_  stole it, I don't see how it could be anyone but him. It's only ever with me or in the room and you two are the only ones who could have done it."

Sam would have supposed that he would simply believe the best of Luc and that there was no way he did it, but it did, in fact, register how extremely possible it was that Luc stole the money. But he still found himself irrationally angry that Adam was accusing him and hating him for it.

"You must have just lost it or something," Sam assured him, completely lying. "Luc's already got a fuck-ton of money; he's got no reason to steal from you—"

"He doesn't need a reason—he's crazy!" Adam tried and half-failed to convince him. Only half because Sam already knew he was right anyway.

"Would you just leave it?" If Sam was still holding his basket of laundry, he would have slammed it again. The anger coursing through him and spilling over the edge was sudden, and his voice was significantly louder than either of them had been before. "If you can't stop insulting my boyfriend, maybe you just need to get a new roommate. And he didn't fucking steal your money, so you can stop bitching."

With that, Adam just stared up at him with a still expression for a few seconds before rolling his eyes and grabbing his basket to walk away. Sam assumed this meant he'd won.

"Whatever, man," said Adam as though he just didn't feel like arguing anymore. "Tell me when you find my money."

Sam stared after him in anger for what felt like several minutes before he finally pushed that anger away long enough to put his clothes in a washing machine and spend a handful of quarters into the slot.

Adam could never understand what he and Lucifer had together.


	6. I don't miss those little talks at all

Once or twice in high school and beyond, it had vaguely occurred to Sam what it might be like to have something shoved up his ass **—** because high school boys always had sex on the mind, and you couldn't blame him for being curious. And then, of course, after he'd walked in on Dean and Cas in the Impala that one time and the image was burned into his retinas, it had only been natural to wonder what that was like or if he'd ever want to. Especially considering Dean had been so against it and tried so hard not to be interested in guys his whole life but was now, apparently, actively a bottom.

And judging by the screams that Sam had been kept up several nights by and was forever cursed to remember, Dean  _really_  enjoyed it.

Sam hadn't thought that he would like it much before, but now he was often more than willing to get on his back and spread his legs for Luc.

It actually wasn't quite as often that Lucifer topped as it was that Sam did, but every time he did, Sam wondered desperately why it wasn't more often. He loved it when Luc was feeling particularly possessive and pressed him down into the bed with such ferocity that he briefly feared they might break it, and he loved seeing the look in Luc's eyes when he would do everything he wanted with him **—** as though he wanted every bit of Sam and didn't know which part to take first.

Late into October was coincidentally one of those evenings **—** or at least it seemed it would be so at first. Luc actually took care, for once, to lock the door and put a " _Do not enter: Sex in progress_ " sign around the outside doorknob because he apparently didn't want there to be even the least chance of interruptions.

"I'm assuming that because you took the sign, there's about to be a sex in progress?" Sam asked, looking up from his laptop. His voice came out with a bit more of a laugh than he'd meant to.

Chuckling in return, Luc got on the bed and crawled over to Sam in the most  _holy-fucking-shit-that's-too-arousing-to-be-legal_ way possible. "Only if you want there to be. If not we can just make really loud moaning noises until someone bangs on the door and tells us to stop."

Without another thought, Sam grinned and put aside his laptop and homework, then leaned forward and pulled Luc in and on top of him.

Just as everything else was with Luc, his sexual tendencies were erratic. That is to say, he had no tendencies. One day he would be listening only to his urges and would slam Sam up against a wall (or bookshelf) before Sam had a chance to do just that, and the very next, he would be a submissive pile of goo. Lucifer was also just as much of a power-bottom as he was a power-top and everything else **—** the surprising thing was that he didn't have nearly as many kinks as Sam would have thought.

Another surprising thing was the way he kissed and held Sam that night. It wasn't  _that_  far from his normal possessive self, but there was a certain, different quality to it. Like he was being more careful so as not to break him because he had only just now realized what a treasure he held in his hands that he didn't want to lose.

Or perhaps to draw more sounds out of him, Sam figured when Luc raked his teeth lightly down where his jaw met his neck and he found himself letting out a moan of an unfamiliar pitch.

Probably both.

The slowness of it was torturous at times. If Sam tried to pull too hard or too fast, Luc stopped him and made him wait just a second or two longer **—** and with Luc seemingly trying to kiss everywhere on his body, he felt the grin of those lips on his skin every time.

Sam preferred it when their bodies were perfectly aligned so that he could have Luc's entire body at once. Connect their mouths, their chests, their groins, and their legs all at the same time, and Sam simply couldn't  _think_  for how amazing it felt. But in a way, he also liked the lack of control he had when Luc wanted his mouth somewhere other than Sam's **—** down his neck, down his chest, down all the way to **—**

" _Oh_."

That was also something that needed to happen more often. Luc seemed to get off just on the way that Sam moaned his name and threaded his hands through his hair, and Sam got off on how much he got off on that.

_Oh, how Lucifer did that thing with his tongue._

When he let his lips pop off of the tip of Sam's erection and made his way back up to his mouth, Sam was whimpering so hard for it that he almost didn't register Luc picking up speed and rhythm with the rutting of his hips or hear the strained "I love you."

It wasn't quite enough to send him jolting upward in shock, but his eyes opened all the way a moment afterwards, and he stared through the continued rutting. Luc didn't seem to be watching for the processing of that confession behind Sam's eyes, but rather simply expecting him to take it as he dipped down and kissed him again and again and again.

 _It hasn't even been two months. This is what hormonal teenagers who don't know what love_ is _do, not adults, and most certainly not sane ones. He doesn't love you. He's not capable of love._

Sam didn't mentally respond. He wasn't even going to try to dignify that one.

 _But then again, are_ you _?_

"I love you too," he whispered as Luc's lips moved to the side of his mouth, and it came out as though fulfilling something  _huge_  inside him, like saying those words was the key to relieving him of some sort of burden and sending warmth throughout his body.

And sending something throughout Luc as well, since he seemed to break just slightly as Sam responded, looking him straight in the eyes for a moment before attacking all the bare skin with his mouth again. With each breathless kiss to his neck and jaw and collarbone, he would let out what sounded like a moan **—** "Sam,  _I love you_... Sam, oh God, I love you,  _Sam_..."

Sam shut him up by pulling him up to kiss him raw, and Luc didn't seem to mind the sudden break in his submissiveness.

Luc's lubed-up fingers pressing into him minutes later had Sam a mess of whimpering and guttural noises and then one loud scream of Luc's name as his fingers curled and brushed his prostate. It had Luc smiling as though he was looking down on the most beautiful thing in the world, which made Sam desperate to pull him down to kiss him more, but he couldn't. As he added more fingers, Sam arched his back more and more, absolutely  _aching_  to let Luc take all of him.

"Are you sure?" came the expected guttural whisper from Luc's throat, as it happened every time, and Sam nearly  _screamed_  yes before he grabbed Sam's hips and pushed himself in.

This was one of those moments where Lucifer seemed to be at his most vulnerable. The first moment that he was inside Sam, every single time no matter what kind of lover he was being, was the same **:** His expression would be one of sheer pleasure and at the same time innocence and a sense of unworthiness, as though he felt he didn't deserve to have this. And then in the next moment that expression would be lost, and he would just retain his pleasure but otherwise there would be nothing less than simultaneous ownership and worship in his eyes.

Lucifer wasn't trying to be particularly gentle anymore, and Sam was fine with that because he loved it when he was fucked this hard, when he could hear the bed creak loudly and hit the wall, when Luc had to swallow his moans and screams with his own mouth. He loved the fast breathing and the sharp moans he heard from Luc above him and the grip so hard on his hips and waist and neck that it would probably leave bruises, and he loved the feeling of being  _full_. Most of all he loved the things Luc said when he was like this.

"Tell me **—** say that you're mine...," Luc half-moaned into his ear as he slowed his thrusts and arched down. His voice was full of need, and the way he touched the man below him was desperate.

Sam's mouth pulled itself into a hazed grin as he involuntarily thrust his hips upward.

" _I'm yours_ ," he breathed, sinking his nails into Luc's back and pulling him closer. "I've been yours since the day you met me..."

 _You don't belong to_ anyone _, Sam. You can't. You're a person._

"Shut up," he growled aloud without meaning to, and without even caring once he realized a moment later.

"What?"

Luc didn't seem to be too confused to stop or even slow down very much, but his brow was furrowed for the moment being.

"Not you, the voice in my head."

"Oh."

In the near-climax haze, Sam barely registered how casual that sounded. Like he didn't find it strange at all **—** well, he probably already knew about the voice. But then Luc added, while slipping a hand in between them,

"I'll help you get rid of that."

Not too many thrusts and strokes later, Sam was coming undone in Luc's arms, screaming some incoherent words, and Luc rode him out until he came as well. He pulled himself out, leaving Sam feeling empty, and collapsed at his side, still breathing heavily.

For a few minutes, Sam just stared at the ceiling and tried to catch his breath, but when he rolled his head over to the side and looked at Luc, he couldn't help but grin and giggle madly and then lean forward to kiss him softly. The edge of Luc's lips twitched upward, and he tightened his grip on Sam into several seconds of silence.

"Why do you always ask if I'm sure?" Sam thought to ask quietly, shifting back a little to get a better look at Luc's face. The other man widened his eyes slightly and fixed them on him, giving him a questioning look. "Every time before we **—** um, do the thing. You always ask me if I'm sure I want to do it."

There were another few seconds where the only sound was that of them breathing before Luc said, just as quietly, "I don't want to do anything that you don't want me to. I need to know that you want it. And I need  _you_  to know that I will never trick you, or lie to you, or try to push you into anything you don't want to do."

He moved his hand from where it was splayed out on Sam's stomach to his face, caressing it gently and rubbing his thumb across Sam's jawline. The calming motion had the man in question breathing deeply and feeling peaceful.

"I do want it," Sam assured him, shifting entirely onto his side. "I want everything you could ever give me."

"People can change their minds."

"I won't." Taking Luc's face in his hands, Sam pulled him forward to kiss him again, then pushed their foreheads together. "I'll always want you. You're  _mine_."

After the kiss that Luc gave him for that, Sam's knees were almost too weak for him to get up and take the sign off the outside of the door.

* * *

With Halloween rolling around, students were putting up decorations in the dorms and hallways left and right, and Sam couldn't go five minutes outside of a lesson without hearing about some party being planned.

"Someone apparently managed to book one of the local bars for an off-campus party on Halloween, and we're gonna go **—** you should come and bring Luc!" Amelia was telling him, and at the mention of Luc, Ava nodded vehemently. Sam tried not to glare at her too much.

"I'll see if he wants to," he said with a sip of his drink, secretly hoping that Luc wouldn't want to. There was something twisting in his gut at the mention of Halloween parties, but it didn't quite register to him exactly what that was.

The next morning, two days before Halloween, Sam realized with a painful gasp **—** Halloween was the day that Jess had died in that fire.

He was over Jess. He had to be. No one held on to someone for that long **—** well, his father had held onto his mother's memory, but he'd gotten over Jess a while ago. It had to at least have been when he got with Ruby over two years back.

And now he had Luc. Jess was gone and out of his life, and that void had been filled a hundred times over. Luc occupied it now and he was _fine_.

But he wasn't fine. Sam told himself that he was okay and that Jess didn't matter to him anymore **,** but that wasn't making him feel any wasn't that he wasn't able to believe himself due to feelings for Jess stirring up in his chest again, though. It was that he had such an easy time believing that he didn't care about Jess anymore, and for that he was disgusted with himself.

The whole thing made Sam want to break down and wait for the week to pass so he didn't have to suffer all the internal ambivalence. But he went on and functioned fine for the next couple days **—** during the day, at least. He was like a robot during his lessons like usual, present enough to pay attention to lessons but emotionally and mentally far off in the distance, but at night he wasn't fine.

He wasn't fine because he didn't sleep.

Ever since he'd met Lucifer, Sam hadn't had the insomnia problem **—** until now. It had gone away for so long and then just suddenly  _happened_ , with no signs of it other than him sitting upwards in bed all of Wednesday night and not being able to sleep or even getting the least bit tired.

Lucifer noticed the dark rings around his eyes when he arrived in Greek Mythology and asked why he hadn't slept, so Sam explained without hesitation.

And then, directly following his recount of what Jess's death's anniversaries always did to him and how it was apparently affecting him now, he added, "Oh **—** Amelia invited us to go with her friends to a Halloween party. Do you want to go?"

By the look on his face, Luc didn't seem all that surprised that Sam was even going to consider going to a Halloween party after all that he'd just told him about Jess. His smile gave Sam a feeling of unnatural warmth as he nodded slowly, their eyes locked but somehow feeling a bit loose.

"Yes, I think it would help you get over her," he advised.  _And everyone would see us together, and they would all know that you're mine,_ was what he wasn't saying, but what he also didn't need to say because it was conveyed well enough in his eyes. Hell, it was conveyed every time they were in the same room.

Their thighs were side-by-side on the seat and both of their arms on the outside rested on the desk. Sam vaguely imagined that from the back, they probably looked almost perfectly symmetrical but for the height difference. Up that close, Luc was all smoke and rough edges, and Sam couldn't make out the details of his face that well, as though he was blurred. He simply breathed him in, and his head drooped down to meet Luc's at the very peak of their foreheads. Luc's hand came up to grip him by the back edge of his jaw and close the angle between their faces for a short kiss.

Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find that Luc had done that purposely just to keep him feeling grounded and independent of memories of Jess for the time being. It worked, in any case.

That evening, as they both assumed Sam still wouldn't be able to sleep, Luc invited him to his dorm and kicked Crowley out for the night. He held tightly onto Sam's face and just kissed him, not going any further than that, for a long time. For long intervals of time he held onto him and ran his fingers through his hair and then kissed him again, and they shared a short conversation or a memory or something irrelevant (usually from Luc), and then held onto each other again.

Neither of them slept all night, and Sam didn't question Luc's ability to go on without any sleep.

They texted back and forth all day Friday, and after the Greek Mythology lesson, Luc dragged him straight out of the building and towards the parking lot.

"Where are we going?" Sam thought to ask only when Luc was actually putting his keys into the door of his Coupe. The thought crossed his mind as more of a curiosity than an urgency.

"Halloween store. We need costumes for the party, don't we?"

Oh, man. It had been so long since Sam had worn a costume for Halloween **—** or even celebrated the holiday, for that matter. He'd honestly forgotten that that was a thing people did.

The store was full of families shopping last-minute with their kids as well as a handful of teenagers, but for the most part not college students. Ironically enough, it was the first time that people actually  _were_  giving them a lot of looks just for walking around, and yet Sam wasn't worrying.

Obviously, it was straight to the adults' section for them. And there luckily weren't very many people over there. Sam stuffed his hands in his pockets and awkwardly ambled along the walls of costumes as Luc strode into the aisles with purpose. He couldn't help but smile and let out a short laugh at that **—** not only because Luc looked like a family man from the back while in this store, but also because all this actually kind of brought out the innocence in him. But then that made Sam think of how he'd probably never had a proper childhood, just like how  _he_ hadn't, and his smile faded quickly.

"I think you should wear this," said Luc, finally turning around and approaching him with a plastic package in hand.

Sam took it and only had to read  _Full-sized Moose costume_  before looking up at Luc's entirely serious expression and blinking at him about ten times. "Um. No."

"Come oooooooon..." Drawing out his childish whine, Luc pawed at the front of Sam's shirt in some sort of ironic attempt in seducing him in order to convince him to wear that thing. "It would be so  _fitting_  for you, Sammy."

Sticking his tongue out in response to Luc's smug grin, Sam made to put the costume away and immediately headed over to another part of an aisle, as something in the  _Sexy_  section had caught his eye.

"Here, you can wear this to the party," Sam smirked, handing it to him. It was a Sexy Devilish Waiter costume and in fact was really just red boyshorts that would be distinctly tight around Luc's crotch, a red cape, horns, and a pitchfork.

Luc snorted a mirthless laugh, then pursed his lips and stepped closer to Sam again, this time hooking his fingers through the other man's belt loops. "But would you  _really_  want everyone else to see that much of me?"

"I **—** " Sam hadn't thought of that. And now, the mental image of Luc walking around with his bare chest and legs showing where probably more than a hundred other people could see was both infuriating (especially at the thought of Ava being there and staring) and arousing. He had to force himself not to pull Luc forward by his hips right then. "I would  _hate_  that, actually."

After several more minutes of both of them trying to choose outfits for each other, they agreed on a Lumberjack costume for Sam (there were no sexy outfits for men for that one, but they resolved that by buying a size too small so it would be tight) and a Male Angel for Luc. They were both pretty pleased with the irony in that.

When they were heading down the middle of the store to go buy them, Sam stopped them before they could get to the desk and told Luc to wait while he got one more thing. He ran into an aisle that he'd spotted another thing in and came out less than a minute later holding a hat with moose antlers, which he put on his head with a sigh.

Luc readily dropped the two costumes he was holding and pulled Sam roughly in by his shirt collar for a kiss, which lasted much too long for them being in public and not only in plain sight, but also close proximity, of other people. Not that either of them cared.

This time, they  _were_  asked to stop, and scandalized looks from several mothers followed them as they smirked and went to the counter at the front to pay for their costumes.

* * *

They drove to the party in Sam's car but met up with Amelia and her friends soon after arriving at the bar. It was a surprise that they managed to get to them so quickly, though, what with all the loud music and people mingling around.

" _Nice_ ," Lily laughed when they approached, eyeballing Sam ironically. She had one of those costumes that could have been a gothic version of anything, a drink in one hand and the other around Rose's (who was a half-shirt cowgirl) shoulder. "What's with the antlers?"

Sam could practically hear Luc smirking behind him and stuttered **—** "It's, uh, kind of an inside joke. Luc likes them." He then had the sudden, but thankfully brief, mental image of him having actual antlers and Luc holding onto them for balance while he rode his cock, and he had to hide his pupils suddenly dilating with a fake cough and feigned smile.

Amelia and Ava finished getting their own drinks at that point and turned around to join the scene as Galadriel and a classic Sexy Devil, respectively. Sam could honestly and greatly appreciate Amelia's dedication to Lord of the Rings and the details in her outfit, but Ava's dress really didn't flatter her very much. And that was either all the gay sex affecting his knowledge of fashion or his grudge over her liking his boyfriend.

"Hey, Luc," Ava greeted, looking past Sam and clearly trying (and failing) to do it in a way that might seduce him.

All that earned from either of them was an internal scowl, and Sam could see Luc's mouth twitch out of his peripheral vision before the man reached over and very firmly **—** and obviously **—** grabbed his ass.

He didn't say anything in response, and Sam could tell that meant Luc didn't even think it worth it to give her a polite "I'm taken, you know that," let alone return the greeting.

Looking dejected, she was now merely trying to act normal. And failing.

"I'm just **—** gonna go scope out the guys," she said awkwardly, moving away just as so. Sam couldn't bring himself to feel sorry.

At once, Amelia threw both of them a sharp, slightly disgusted, but mostly angry look. And mostly at Luc. "I know you guys have been together for a while, but would it hurt you to spare her feelings? You know she likes you."

"And she should get over it because I'm  _Sam's_ , and she knows it," said Luc, his voice stiff and distant and his eyes cold.

"It  _has_  been nearly a month since she's known," Sam qualified, feeling the need to add something based purely on logic to Luc's point. He glanced briefly and effortlessly into the crowd to look for her **—** or to pretend to, anyway. "And Luc doesn't even like  _women_ , so it's just plain unwanted advances on her part. If there was a guy coming on to Lily even though she's clearly not interested, you'd be all over  _his_ ass. You can't hold that kind of double standard for gay men." With that, he put on one of his signature bitch-faces and waited for Amelia to sigh in defeat.

"Yeah, I know, but..." She looked to Lily, who was sipping her drink and giving her a  _He's right, you know_  look. "Ugh. Fine. But if I find her crying in the bathroom or something, it would be the least you could do to be nice for one fucking second and say 'Hun, I'm sorry, but I like dick. Sam's dick. And you don't have a dick and you're not Sam, so.'"

After that, she just moved her eyes back down to her own level and sighed, walking hurriedly away into the crowd after Ava. Lily and Rose weren't paying attention to them anymore, so they were essentially left alone.

A few seconds later, Sam laughed, and Luc looked at him questioningly. "Oh, I just **—** I was thinking about you saying that, and the only part that I honestly couldn't imagine you saying was ' _I'm sorr_ y.'"

He himself wasn't even sure why that was so funny, but Luc understood immediately and gave him a wide smirk.

They soon decided to get drinks, and not long after that, there was already a woman dressed as Catwoman trying to flirt with Sam at the bar. Sam allowed her to talk to him casually for a minute rather than being rude, but then the conversation was rather rudely (but gladly) interrupted by Luc tapping him on the shoulder from the back to get his attention and then pulling him into a long kiss **—** which lasted until the woman said an uncomfortable (and probably a bit guilty) "Sorry" and walked away.

Luc smiled rather toothily when he pulled away, still holding Sam's face, and their locked gazes held a silent exchange to decide that they wanted to keep doing that.

So for a lot of the rest of the night, they kept at it. Milling about the bar and letting other people buy them drinks and chat them up (they were two rather attractive young men, so a lot of people wanted to hook up with them, it seemed), and then the other watching from several feet away for a minute before going over and planting a deep one on them.

It was a strangely fun way to show everyone they were both taken. Added thrill came from the glares they got, both from the strangers trying to flirt and those who passed them by while they were kissing. Sam almost expected some douche to try and push them apart and shout slurs at them, but no one did, and he could only assume it was because his height was too intimidating.

It was also fairly addicting. Letting a normal person try to talk to him and almost consciously (he didn't even have to try, so when he didn't try  _not_  to it was worse than ever) drifting further and further away, and then having Luc show up and bringing him crashing to the ground was a better high he could have gotten off any drugs. And doing that  _over and over again_... Oh, it might as well have been  _sex_.

Not nearly as many people went after Luc as they did for Sam, though. It confused him at first, as there was no way it was due to his looks being worse, but he later realized that it was because Luc had an actual reputation. And he had to realize it through a guy passing dressed as Aladdin saying, just loud enough to hear over everything else, "Oh God, it's that freak from Psychology."

Sam would have chased the guy down and pounded his head into the floor if Luc hadn't held him back (for which he really wasn't sure and didn't bother to ask  _why_ ). But in the next moment he was kissing Luc  _hard_ , tongue down his throat and hands at his ass, because at the very least he wanted to be known as "the boyfriend of that freak from Psychology."

The displays of possessiveness from both of them became more frequent until it seemed that nearly everyone who might have had the least bit of interest in either of them had already suffered at their hands (and lips,  _zing_ ) or had seen them making out. For a while there wasn't much to do but whisper to each other about some of the particularly bad costumes and take handfuls of candy from the bowls that were set up around the place.

At some point, though, Sam was so built up with the urge to rip Luc's halo off and dirty him up more than he was allowed in a bar full of people that he very nearly  _carried_  him to the men's bathroom. Once inside, it was difficult to wait until they were inside a stall to get on his knees and jerk Luc's pants down.

They left the bathroom both a bit weak at the knees and distinctly disheveled, Luc radiant with smugness and Sam's lips honestly looking a _lot_  like they'd just been around a cock. One look at his knees and anyone would have been able to tell what he'd just been doing, but he didn't care. It was a nice end to their stay at the Halloween party.

Or it would have been, had Lily not strutted up to them with anger in her eyes and in the jerky way her hips moved, and said accusingly, "Have you guys been  _drunk_  half the time, or do you just honestly enjoy making people feel like shit?"

Luc smirked, smugness now level 10. "The second one."

Lily's scowl deepened to disgust and she looked at Sam, apparently hoping for a better answer. And for a split second, he actually felt a twinge of what might have been guilt.

"Don't act like we can help it that everyone wants a piece of our ass," were the words he chose, almost entirely for Luc's amusement.

"Just like you can't help it that you each led on about  _twenty_  people tonight for the fun of it?" Now she was nearly screaming, and Sam stepped back an inch. Not that he was actually intimidated; he simply hadn't expected it. Some of the surrounding party-goers stared. "Yeah, you can show each other off, but now everyone at this party  _knows_  you, and most of them hateyou now, either because they're homophobic or because they have a legitimate  _reason_  to think you're complete assholes."

"Excuse me, I prefer the term 'psychopathic freak,'" said Luc with a smile, before Sam could say anything back to her. She turned her disgusted glare on him for several seconds before it faded to frustration.

" _Ugh_ **—** you know what, I'm done with you two. I don't want to insult Sam or his taste in men, but I'm pretty sure it's  _you_  that's the reason he's pulling this shit. But I'm so pissed I'm probably gonna end up getting too drunk to remember tonight anyway."

With a huff and one last glare, she left, and Sam caught a glimpse of Amelia back where Lily was headed to before he grabbed Luc's hand and just kept walking towards the door.

It was only then that he realized he hadn't thought about Jess a single time during the whole party. The realization didn't keep him from walking further, but his heart suddenly beat a little differently, and he saw a little differently. He thought about what they did the whole party and felt a vague sense of guilt in his chest that came in soft pulses; but he thought about Jess and felt nothing. Even as he searched his pocket for the keys to his car and talked to Luc, he fruitlessly searched his mind for the regret and remorse that had been there for so long.

Sam waited for some sort of voice to come and tell him how horrible he was being or how Lucifer was toxic or something. It didn't come. At some point he just gave up on waiting because he could  _fee_ l that it wasn't there anymore, not even hiding in the crevices of his mind.

His voice of reason seemed to be completely gone, pushed out like some unwanted resident whom he had wanted to evict for a long time but never said anything to.

He slept that night.


	7. Everything's a little twisted

The following Monday, Lily proved to still remember most of Halloween night, as Sam could tell by the short glare she gave him as soon as he sat down at their table. Apparently, and not surprisingly, Ava and Amelia knew what he and Luc had been doing as well, since they briefly partook in mutual glaring.

Seconds after his butt made contact with the seat, Sam noticed Amelia nudge Ava's arm, a furtive glance, and then Ava looking up at him and taking a long, guilty breath.

"I'm sorry for consistently trying to make a move on your man, okay?" she said nearly robotically, and it was obvious that she had both been put up to it by Amelia and rehearsed it. At once, she looked back down at her plate and stabbed her salad with her fork, while Sam continued to sit there awkwardly.

"Um **—**?"

"And she's not gonna do it again," Amelia insisted with gritted teeth, at which Ava sighed and looked up again.

"And I'll stop doing it. Sorry." Another sigh, and it seemed  _slightly_  more convincingly apologetic. Sam smirked in amusement at her embarrassment, now that he entirely understood what was going on. "S'not my fault Luc's a babe," she added in a mutter.

" _Ava_ , can we not?" Lily groaned, exasperated.

"Hey, I'm not trying to steal him away or flirt with him **—** I'm just saying!" She put her hands up in defense, but Sam just became more tense. He realized that he should have been flattered in Luc's place, but he just got angrier, for some reason. "Okay **—** Sam, seriously. I get it. You don't want anyone to flirt with your boyfriend. Which I won't do anymore. And I totally get why you were doing the thing at the party to show him off **—** if I was dating a fine piece of ass like that, I'd want everyone to know he was mine, too!"

"...Thanks," he relented, a decent-sized portion of his grudge against Ava dropping off. But while he should have been glad for the forgiveness, Sam couldn't help but register the fact that Ava having no problem with what he'd been doing with Luc probably meant she wasn't all right in the head, either.

Forgiveness was a strange thing. Or at least it was in this case. Sam didn't fully understand why he would have even needed it in the first place, as he didn't have any problem with leading people on and making them feel like shit just for the sake of showing Luc off. And now that Lily and Amelia were warily and gradually gaining it for him, he wasn't sure whether he wanted it. He didn't think Luc would have wanted it or even cared, either.

Lily would always be wary about him because of Halloween night, he was sure. She was quickly letting go of it, but the next time she directly mentioned Luc to him, she said **—**

"He's kind of like the little Devil on your shoulder."

He finished tapping out a text to Luc and snapped his head up to her. "How do you mean?"

Giving him a look over the top of her drink that said  _You know exactly what I mean_ , she told him, "You're different when you're around him or talking to him. You're more...  _willing_  to do things, I guess. Essentially, he's an asshole, and you start being an asshole when you're around him."

Sam scowled **—** not only at what she said, but at the expression she gave him afterwards, like she didn't give a fuck what he thought of her opinion. That  _infuriated_  him.

"There is  _nothing_  wrong with him **—** how 'bout you shut the fuck **—** "

"Woah **—** I didn't mean it like that, Sam," Lily stopped him, clearly trying to sound confident, but a hint of a tremor in her voice betrayed her. "Everyone's an asshole in their own way. I just mean you change when you're around him. I'm not even saying he's bad for you. If he makes you happy, everything else is fine."

He was still angry, though. Angrier than he was showing in his face or his body language, and he wasn't completely sure why, and he couldn't help it. Amelia and Ava had scooted a little away from him and were looking wary, as though genuinely afraid he might blow up at them or even hurt them.

Sam was kind of afraid of that, too. He needed to get away, just for now.

Standing up with his tray, he took a deep breath and said, as calmly as his anger would let him, "I'm just really fucking tired of everyone insulting my boyfriend to my  _face_."

As he walked away, it registered to him that what made him the angriest was that everything Lily said was true.

* * *

Directly after his Greek Mythology lesson on Wednesday, Sam returned to his dorm to find it half-empty and an exhausted-looking Adam gathering his books together to put in one of the empty boxes that were sitting on the floor. His roommate didn't acknowledge his presence for the several seconds that he was just standing there next to his bed, though, until he coughed loudly.

"Um," was all Sam felt he needed to say, along with an incredibly confused, furrowed brow.

As though only just having noticed him there, Adam stood up and smiled in mock-politeness.

"Oh, don't mind me. Just, uh **—** getting out of your way,  _Sammy_ ," he said, his voice fading to bitterness and his stance returning to its crouched state, putting away books, throughout the sentence.

"Don't call me Sammy," he said on reflex, and he briefly thought it odd that that was a priority above all else. "Sammy is what my  _brother_ calls me."

"And Luc, apparently," said Adam, now closing the box with packaging tape. Sam could practically hear the eyeroll in his voice **—** though it wasn't loud enough over his sudden disorientation and internal shock:

 _Does he?_  Thinking back on it, he could only vaguely remember Luc using that nickname with him. Normally he found it extremely annoying when anyone but Dean called him  _Sammy_ , but if Adam wasn't lying (and really, what reason would he have to lie about something like that?), then he had just been subconsciously ignoring it or brushing it off for the past couple months.

He tried his best to recompose himself, as he obviously didn't want Adam to have any idea what was going on in his head, and frowned again.

"So what the Hell  _is_  this, then?"

"What's it  _look_  like?" Adam said with a scoff, straightening himself and looking directly at Sam again. "I'm moving out. You told me that I should find a new roommate, so I did. I'm sick and tired of getting off of work and having to find you and your psychopath boyfriend passed out naked, or being forced to stay out of my own dorm because you two are fucking **—** or getting  _complaints and gay slurs_  plastered to the fucking door because you and Luc are so goddamn loud the whole floor can hear you going at it!" With that, he stood up and took a step back, as though he was afraid to be too close to Sam while he continued. "And frankly, I just don't fucking want to live around you anymore. Luc is rubbing off on you, man. The guy's a klepto and I wouldn't be surprised if he's ever murdered someone. I don't feel like getting gutted in my sleep."

Sam felt the stab of Adam's animosity straight in the pit of his stomach, but no remorse or sense of betrayal came from it. He just resented having Luc talked about like that. His face contorted almost involuntarily and he jerked back.

"So you're actually willing to do that?" he spat, feeling that anger rise up in his chest again. "You're gonna waste all the money you spent on this room in your tuition and go live with someone else?"

"Well, I can't get the money back. I'm perfectly fine with paying half the rent for Samandriel's apartment, because I'm a  _responsible adult_  who actually  _does his job_."

Sam might have snapped something nasty back at him or even lunged to physically attack Adam if someone who looked a  _lot_  like Matthew hadn't stepped into the room right then (Hell, the only thing that kept Sam from thinking it  _was_  Matthew was that he was taller), effectively getting in between them. He could only assume it was Samandriel.

"Is that the last box?" he asked Adam, seemingly oblivious to what he'd just prevented. Or just purposely ignoring it.

"Yeah, you can just carry the empty ones. For some reason I thought we might have needed more." Acting as though Sam was no longer there, they picked up their respective boxes and began to leave **—** but then Adam turned around in the doorway and looked directly at him. "Listen, I don't hate you entirely. I'm just making a responsible decision because I don't trust your boyfriend, and really, neither should you. Just... I don't know. Call me when you get your shit together or when you finally break up with Luc. Whichever comes first."

When Adam slammed the door shut, Sam wasn't quite sure what to feel. But that confusion and indecisiveness faded after a few seconds, at which he realized that his roommate being gone meant there was nothing keeping Luc from sharing the room with him.

And then he ceased to care about all else.

* * *

The only thing that kept Luc from moving in entirely was that he didn't feel like bringing all of his things into Sam's room, and that he still relied on Crowley for food. He took an armful of his books with him, but that was it.

Sam had waited until Luc's routine visit at the library to tell him, as he'd wanted to see his reaction **—** and twenty minutes wasn't that long of a wait, anyway. He perfectly anticipated the enthusiastic kiss Luc pulled him in for upon hearing the news.

"You can tell your brother to tell Adam that his plan was counter-productive," Luc said smoothly to a scowling Matthew, and Sam silently agreed.

How could Adam possibly have thought he was leaving Sam alone to "get his shit together?" Obviously he was only going to spend more time with Luc, with Adam gone.

He was only going to get  _more_  dangerous.

That thought only vaguely registered as something he should have been concerned about, and he brushed it off as if it were nothing.

"You can tell your boyfriend to leave you alone because you've got work to do," Matthew then said dryly to Sam, who returned the scowl but slowly pushed Luc to a safe distance **—** not before giving him a short kiss on the cheek, though.

"Sorry," he muttered into his cheek.

Rather than giving him his usual pout or grimace, though, Luc half-smirked and said, "I have some work to do, anyway."

For the rest of the evening, Sam saw surprisingly little of Luc. And the little that he did see of him was actually in the aisle, rather than him hanging around the front desks at all. Luc wasn't there to look jealous and angry when people walked up to Sam to ask him a question, not even those who seemed slightly flirtatious, which Luc normally had some sort of internal radar to detect when they were near Sam. He just assumed that Luc must have been genuinely busy with a project.

There were a few kisses stolen when he had books to put away, but Matthew didn't even have to show up and tell Sam to get to work for them to part and go about each of their businesses. It was a strange night.

Late in the evening, when Sam and Matthew had all the returned books stacked in front of them, the latter was frantically searching around his section of the desk, his exhales gradually becoming louder and more exasperated. Sam watched with growing amusement until Matthew finally stood straight up like a spring and said,

"Have you seen my stamp? I could have sworn it was here, like, an hour ago. But it's not on the desk or on the floor or anything."

"Dude, just use another one," Sam brushed him off, returning to his own slow work.

"That's the thing, though **—** there  _are_  no other ones," Matthew pressed, sounding slightly more like a headcase. "They've all just slowly been disappearing throughout the past few weeks, and I was finally down to my last one, and now that one's gone too."

Sam let out a breathy laugh, as he had to admit, the whole situation was pretty funny. "Maybe the stamp-fairy is stealing them."

"Or maybe a  _person_  is stealing them," Matthew said seriously, the look in his eyes heavily suggestive of a specific person. Sam chose to ignore the implications and pretend he didn't understand them.

"Who would steal library stamps? A librarian ghost?" he laughed, finding the fed-up look on Matthew's face more and more hilarious. "My money's on the stamp-fairy."

In a moment of obligatory sympathy several seconds later, Sam sighed, scooted his stool back, and checked in the shelves for library stamps. All he found was an empty plastic box, at which he sat up straight and just shrugged at Matthew before continuing with his own work.

At some point after midnight, Sam finally clocked out and left the library with Luc to get some books from his dorm to bring it to their newly shared one. The second the door was shut, the books were on the floor and Luc was pulling Sam onto the bed **—** not in a sexual way, though. He just wanted to lie down with him, it seemed.

"So what  _exactly_  did Adam say to you?" Luc asked him, his hand stroking back and forth just above Sam's hip.

Raising his eyebrow a fraction of an inch at Luc's curiosity towards the matter but otherwise not commenting on it, Sam told him everything he remembered.

"So yeah, he's delusional and he doesn't trust me anymore, and he trusts you even less," he finished. "We had a fight about that a couple weeks ago, too **—** he's convinced you stole money from him."

"Yeah, I did," Luc shrugged, his face mostly impassive.

Not too much to Sam's surprise, he didn't feel like that had come unexpected, and he wasn't angry or disappointed with him. In fact, the only thing he thought to say was "Why?"

"I don't like him. I usually steal from people I don't like to piss them off." With that, Luc smirked deviously and leaned closer to brush his lips over Sam's. He shivered at the teasing contact, which Luc evidently liked because he tightened his grip on Sam's hipbone. "And this time," he added in a whisper, "it got us a room to ourselves for the rest of the year."

Something bubbled up in his chest and Sam grinned, letting out a few small laughs as his arms snaked around Luc's waist to grip him tightly and turn him onto his back, pressing multiple, gradually deepening kisses to Luc's mouth.

Several minutes later, when he was pulling Luc's pants off and tossing them aside, he noticed a library stamp fall out of the pocket and clatter to the floor. He wasn't at all surprised.

* * *

Officially living with Luc meant Sam had significantly less time to himself, which in turn fueled his **—** whatever it was that he had with Luc. An obsession? An  _addiction_?

Sam was perfectly willing to admit that he was obsessed. He didn't find anything wrong with that, and whenever Amelia or Lily (and occasionally even Gary) referred to it as such, he felt proud and just a little bit smug.

Essentially, Luc had ruined his life so bad that he didn't even  _care_ , just like any obsession with a book or tv series or website might. He was happy **—** enthusiastic, even **—** to be ruined by him. A fairly small percentage of his day was spent  _away_  from Luc at this point, but when he was, he felt worse than he had before he'd met him. He wasn't just  _lost_  when he wasn't with him; he was desperate and hungry. Luc's presence became something that he physically craved.

And he was okay with that. No matter what anyone told him or might tell him (because he was sure that Dean would), he was okay with it. It was perfect.

Living with Luc also showed Sam a lot of things that he hadn't known about him beforehand. Or perhaps it just brought out things in Luc that he wouldn't have done around anyone but Sam?

Somewhat unexpectedly, Luc really liked music, alongside books. He appreciated the classics not unlike how Dean did, and sometimes he would talk about some of the famed artists from the early 90s and back as though he'd known them personally. The thing was, though, he didn't blast Led Zeppelin and Bon Jovi on a radio all hours of the day like Sam might have expected (he could easily imagine Luc doing that to annoy Crowley) **—** he just  _sang_  them. Often at the most inappropriate possible times.

More than once, Sam found himself telling Luc to stop singing Stairway to Heaven so he could concentrate on studying. Luc would look sadly at him a moment before shutting up, and then starting back up again, this time louder, a few minutes later.

That one was evidently his favorite. One Sunday, he sang it about fifty times throughout the whole day **—** and that wasn't counting all the times he just picked up in the middle of the song or sang portions of it.

"You think you could sing something else, maybe?" Sam asked dully after about the twentieth time, stretching in his chair and turning to look at Luc, who was lying on his back on the floor, legs propped up against the bed.

"Sorry, just trying to get the song out of my head," he muttered, folding his hands over his stomach and closing his eyes for a minute before saying: "You know what my favorite part of that song, is, Sammy?"  
"Hm?"

"' _Yes there are two paths you can go by_ _ **—**_ _but in the long run, there's no time to change the road you're on..._ ' I'm not completely sure why, I just always liked it. There's just something about that line that gets me."

Sam smiled, finding it sort of endearing. Luc even in a semi-philosophical state was one of the best versions of him, as he liked to be reminded that on top of everything else, his boyfriend was also fairly cultured and intelligent.

"You know what I never understood?" said Sam, and this time Luc opened his eyes to poke his head upward and raise his eyebrows questioningly. "Why it's the  _Stairway_  to Heaven, but the Highway to Hell. I feel like stairs are way too much of an effort to take in order to get to Heaven, and a highway is too easy to get to Hell. There should be a stairway to Hell so you could trip and fall on the way there."

Lucifer's face was pulled into a grin and a bout of laughter that added a shine to his dull eyes, but he then let his head fall to the floor again and said, "Heaven is supposed to take a lot of work to get into, though. A stairway would just be the final challenge to top it all off. Meanwhile all the things you do to supposedly get into Hell **—** lying, cheating, stealing, jealousy and the seven deadly sins and all that... that's all just human nature, and that's easy. We're all going down that highway from the very start."

For several seconds, Sam just sat there in silence and stared at Luc, thinking about what he'd said. Then, on a sudden, inexplicably overwhelming urge, he left his chair, got on the floor just above where Luc was lying on the floor, and bent over him to kiss him upside-down.

"No fair, I want to be Spiderman," Luc smirked, and Sam matched it with his own as he smacked another short kiss on his lips before returning to his homework.

It was barely even a minute before he started singing Stairway to Heaven again.

And Sam had to admit, he enjoyed listening to Luc sing. His voice had become one of those addicting qualities about him, and what was more **—** when it got too annoying, he could always shut him up with more kisses, which would indefinitely lead to more. It was a win-win.

* * *

Lucifer had anger issues. But really, it was far more fitting to say that he was emotionally unstable: He would do things that were on the extreme end of probable reactions to certain things, as well as say and do things that didn't at all fit whatever he actually seemed to be feeling at the moment.

Sam had begun to notice the extremes Luc would go to in his annoyance or anger long before now, but they were getting more noticeable and... well. More extreme.

He didn't consider it too strange when the biggest sign was Luc getting visibly and irrationally angry whenever anyone else said anything either particularly nice or at all unpleasant to Sam **—** probably because the possessiveness turned him on immensely and because it always ended in  _wonderful_ sex. But then he started to register all the significantly dark things Luc would say about other people **—** hollow threats, he was sure, but over small things. Like professors berating him or someone giving him a dirty look in the hallways.

One afternoon, Luc slammed the door open and stormed in with an absolutely  _murderous_  expression on, seeming completely oblivious of Sam jumping up from his position on the bed in concern, and threw his bag to the floor. He ripped a folded-up paper from his pocket and began harshly crumpling it up into a tight back, muttering angrily to himself as he did:

"Fucking tells me I  _misunderstood the project_ **—** I worked on this for  _three fucking days_  and she tries to tell me I don't deserve the top grade, fucking ruins my paper with all the stupid pen-marks, that **—** _stupid_ _ **—**_ _bitch_ **—** "

He ended with throwing the ball of paper that was apparently an essay to the floor and swiftly pulling a lighter out of his pocket, then igniting the paper just as fast. Sam's attention was immediately drawn from Luc's apparent madness to the sudden  _fire_  in the middle of their dorm (on a rug carpet no less), and he stepped forward at once, intending to put it out before anything else.

"Woah,  _shit_ **—** "

But Luc held an arm out and just stood there, watching the flames determinedly; and his face alone, the light of the fire dancing on it, was mesmerizing. Sam watched and waited for a few seconds before remembering that there was still a fire in the room, at which he turned his attention back to the flaming ball of paper. The center of the fire was nearly all the way down to the bottom, which meant another couple seconds and the fire would have spread to the carpet. So Sam took initiative and stomped the fire out, leaving a burnt hole in the carpet where it had been, and then turned to Luc for a proper explanation.

What he got, though, was a broken expression on Luc's face before he let himself fall to his knees, and then all the way to the floor **—** and then curled up halfway into fetal position. For a moment, Sam thought he was crying, but as he bent down, worried and confused, he found that the man was just lying there in hopeless silence.

"Luc, what's...?" he tried to console, putting a gentle hand on his arm and bending over him to try and get a look at his face. But before he could finish, Lucifer let out a loud sob.

"I fucked up, Sam, I **—** _God_ , I'm sorry, I'm stupid and I can't even interpret a stupid prompt right, and now I burnt a hole in the middle of our carpet, just **—** _fuck_ , I'm sorry, please don't leave me, Sam, I'm sorry..."

"Woah woah woah, woah **—** _what?_ **—** No, Luc, I'm not gonna leave you **—** what are you talking about?"

The main surprise for Sam was not that he was new to this sort of breakdown **—** God and Dean knew that he had gone through things like this before **—** but that  _Luc_  was suddenly doing it. He'd never done drugs (or at least Sam could assume so) and didn't seem to have any real reason to be going through this. He could best define it as a temper tantrum turned self-worth crisis. Which didn't seem to make sense because Luc was literally the most narcissistic person he knew.

Slowly, Luc pushed himself off the floor and turned around, his face red and swollen but seeming to have suddenly dried of any tears. If there even had been any to begin with. He looked sad and lost, unlike anything Sam had ever seen on him, and he looked like he was about to go into another fit if Sam hadn't sat down, outstretched his arms, and brought Luc in for a tight hug.

The man practically collapsed against him, pressing his face into Sam's shoulder and clutching onto him like he might fall off at any second. He could feel Luc's whole body shaking in his arms, and that was when his worry kicked into pure sympathy.

"Hey **—** no, shh...," he said softly, rubbing Luc's back comfortingly as he could. "It's fine. I'm not mad. You're not stupid, and you're perfectly allowed to be angry when you're graded unfairly... I love you." He said that last bit quieter than the rest, and then turned his head to press a kiss to Luc's temple, after which he whispered into his ear, again, "I  _love_  you..."

Luc pulled back from Sam's shoulder at some point, immense gratitude in his eyes and devoid of most of his previous panic. He shifted his arms from Sam's back to his neck and pulled himself up to kiss him **—** at first long and slow, but then like he really  _needed_  it.

And  _God_ , Sam loved being something that Lucifer needed.

* * *

There were other temper tantrums and short episodes of Luc shouting obscenities **—** sometimes at other people, sometimes at nothing **—** and Sam having to envelop him in a tight hug to keep him from breaking something in their dorm, and even other moments where Luc had a distinct urge to set something on fire. Sometimes he vocalized it first and sometimes he just pulled out a lighter (which Sam for some reason didn't think to  _take away from him_ ) and went at it.

Lucifer's unstable moods simply became a part of Sam's life, and he grew used to it as one would grow used to an alarm clock that was slightly inconvenient or annoying in the mornings. He didn't see the occasional outbursts and mood swings as a problem, though he did find himself happier when Luc was acting relatively normal.

But occasionally Sam  _was_  left feeling slightly uncomfortable with the sort of things that Luc would do.

Out of nowhere, oftentimes when Sam was in the middle of research, Luc would come up quietly by his side and start pressing kisses to his neck. Which wasn't a problem, since he definitely enjoyed intimacy with Luc more than he enjoyed homework, but it kept him from getting things done. But once again, he didn't consider that much of a problem.

"Mmm... I  _need_  you, Sammy..."

That was the problem. It wasn't until after Adam had pointed it out that Sam actually registered it, though.

He was turned on and it felt slightly wrong.

"Can you, um **—** _ah_ **—** not... call me Sammy?" he asked, trying to hold back moans as Luc's expert tongue slid down his neck. "My brother calls me Sammy. It's kind of...  _ah_ **—** weird..."

At that, Luc pulled back from Sam's necks and looked at him, his eyes displaying some sort of strange dominance and the rest of his face just... smoke and rough edges. Sam felt like he could have cut or burnt himself by reaching out and touching him.

"Okay," he said simply **—** except it wasn't simply. It was slow and methodical and it sent shivers down Sam's spine that both excited and scared him. He slid his fingers slowly and gently across Sam's chest **—** only theoretically gently, though, as it gave off the air that he was trying to shred him to pieces. "Then I want you to only ever use my full name.  _Lucifer_. Everyone else calls me Luc, so this way it's special."

He watched Sam's eyes, watched the thoughts work behind them, and Sam could tell he was enjoying it. He didn't think Lucifer expected or wanted him to refuse, as much as he clearly liked to call him  _Sammy_.

Sam was aware of the implications. His boyfriend wanted him to bring more attention to them at the risk of embarrassment or more people hating them. Lucifer  _was_  the name of Satan, after all. He understood that Lucifer's conditions were an act of possessiveness and revenge, and though it wasn't exactly extreme, it showcased instability and was twisted in its own right.

He didn't mind. He  _liked_  twisted.

He would have been lying if he told himself that  _he_  wasn't a bit twisted.

His discomfort faded away within seconds and a grin stretched onto his face as he gently tugged on Lucifer's hair to pull him in for a short, rough kiss, followed by his mouth on his neck again.

" _Okay_."

* * *

Sam was fired from his job at the library barely two and a half weeks into November.

He and Luc walked in on that Monday to Matthew approaching them with an angry, contorted expression, and pushing an open book into his face first thing. For a moment his eyes had to re-focus, but he then saw that the inside pages of the book were mutilated, as though someone had cut them out with a knife.

"You and your boyfriend have taken it  _too_  far this time, Winchester," said Matthew with gritted teeth as he violently pulled the book back. "This is vandalization of campus property, and I'm  _pretty_  fuckin' sure both of you can get expelled for it, if not have actual charges put against you."

By the time he was finished he was breathing heavily, and Sam was standing stock-still and slightly nervous, but didn't show it. Next to him, Luc was folding his arms and raising an eyebrow.

"Wait **—** hold on, what makes you think either of us had anything to do with that?" he asked, almost surprising himself with how convincingly he managed to seem confused.

Matthew deepened his scowl and clapped the mutilated book shut. "Oh, I don't know, why don't you come see  _why_?"

With that, he stormed off toward the front desks and hailed them to follow, and when they got there Sam saw the pile of vandalized books where Matthew normally stood. He was about to give him a sarcastic "... _And_?" when the kid said **—**

"Every single book from the Biology section that has to do with insects or arachnids was torn up like this **—** that's  _obviously_  targeted towards me! And who hates me enough to do something like that?  _Your_  boyfriend. I would bet my left arm that he did it."

Sam couldn't help but smirk wryly and let out a small laugh at the hilariously (and oh so  _non_ -intimidating) manic look on Matthew's face, and he could tell without looking that Lucifer was doing the same.

"You can't prove I did anything," Lucifer said smoothly, his expression relaxed as though he wasn't the least bit worried.

"Yeah? I filed a complaint to the administrators, and they're coming back with with security footage from the library  _right now_. So we'll see about that."

Sam noticed that Lucifer wasn't even trying to deny it, so he suspected that his boyfriend must have indeed done this (which he really couldn't blame him for; Matthew was a complete dick and definitely deserved the spite), and he was confident that he wasn't going to get caught. Now that they were coming back with footage, though... Sam was scared for him.

The thought of Lucifer getting expelled didn't worry or terrify him on the level that it should have, though. His mind automatically went to the solution of simply dropping out and leaving with him if that were to happen, and while he wasn't completely comfortable with that possibility, he was entirely willing to do that if necessary.

When the head librarian returned with a college administrator and a stack of tapes, they were waved into her office to go watch them. Footage from every Monday through Wednesday since Sam had begun working at the library was on those tapes, and they were forced to sit through all of it. Luckily they were able to go at double, sometimes triple speed to get through it more quickly, as they could easily spot when either of them were on screen.

As they went through, Sam fought harder and harder to keep his nervousness at bay, but Lucifer remained completely calm. He also seemed to be able to tell that Sam was tense because at some point, his hand slid over Sam's thigh and stayed there.

After a few hours, it was clear that they'd gone back too far in the footage for Lucifer to have possibly defaced those books. However, if they were judging directly by the tapes, it was impossible for  _anyone_  to have done it, since it showed no possible perpetrators. Meaning that there was a gap, and some of the security camera footage was missing.

"What? **—** No, it's  _got_  to be in there," Matthew insisted vehemently. He really was starting to sound like a madman. "He must have hacked into the system or stolen a tape or  _something_... I **—** it's not possible! I  _know_  he did it, I **—** "

"Be that as it may," sighed the administrator, side-eyeing Lucifer, "there's no way to prove that he did this. I doubt we could even get a warrant to search his room for proof, especially considering there wouldn't likely be any physical evidence. If you think it necessary, though, we could keep watching all the way through."

And Matthew, being the dick that he was,  _did_  think it was necessary.

For the next few hours, during which Sam would have become extremely tired were it not for Lucifer occasionally letting his hand roam straight to his crotch and immediately making him alert again, they sat there and watched books get sorted in twice the average speed. A handful of that footage was Lucifer reading in the aisles as well as he and Sam making out, which the librarian and administrator seemed to cringe at but didn't say anything.

It was actually pretty hilarious, watching their reactions. Especially considering they were pretty much obligated to watch all the way through it. And from an outside point of view, watching himself make out with Lucifer was pretty damn hot.

One of the make-out sessions, though, didn't seem anywhere close to stopping. And as Sam watched himself side-step into the  _Teen Supernatural Romance_  section, he remembered exactly what this was leading up to. Chancing a glance at Lucifer's expression, he noticed the man was still completely calm and collected. His hand stroked calming circles on Sam's now-tense thigh.

Except they didn't calm him down **—** how could he possibly be calm when he and two staff members of the college were essentially watching softcore porn of himself and his boyfriend?

As soon as footage-Sam's pants were down past his ass and footage-Lucifer was turning him around and pressing him up against the shelf, the librarian quickly leaned forward and paused and ejected the tape, looking partially horrified. Really, everyone but Sam and Lucifer did. Matthew didn't seem at all surprised, though.

"That **—** that's grounds for expulsion, isn't it?" he asked, his voice shaking evidently with anticipation. He clearly wanted them out of the school.

The administrator just sighed and threw Sam and Lucifer a dirty look. "It  _might_  be **—** if this were high school. If these two were to be expelled for sex in the library, we'd have to expel every student who's ever been caught at it. And that's been a lot more than you would think. No, they can't be forced out of the school **—** but they  _can_  be banned from the library. Which I'm sure Ms. Tapping will do."

"You're damn right I will," the librarian muttered under her breath. It seemed a bit strange for someone like her, hair up in a tight bun and crease lines under her eyes, to say, but it definitely fit the situation. Turning to Sam, she said bluntly, "You're fired. And I don't want either of you anywhere near the library again. You need research, go to a library off-campus."

Her glare was piercing, and it was hard to tell whether she was angry about her books being soiled or had some deep-seated homophobia that she was refraining from expressing. Sam could only stare at her for a total of four seconds before her expression tightened and she said, "Well? Get out! Both of you!"

So they looked at each other and did as she said, and as they left the enormous library Lucifer was actually  _laughing_. Sam found himself wholly apathetic to the fact that he no longer had a job somehow, but he didn't quite see what was so funny.

"They're such  _idiots_ ," Lucifer said, grinning up at Sam. "I got the tape with us fucking against the shelves and they didn't even notice."

He fished the tape out of his jacket pocket, and as he wiggled it a bit in his hand for him to see, Sam chuckled as well.

Mulling over it, there was no real consequence of his small income from the library being lost. Like Lucifer had told him before, anyway, he never needed a job to begin with. Crowley could supply more than enough money for both of them. He wasn't sure when exactly he had stopped caring about making his own money, though. One morning he had just woken up and found that he'd lost that moral value entirely.

Or perhaps he had been kissed and touched by Lucifer one too many times and then lost that moral value entirely.

On the next corner they rounded, Sam pressed Lucifer up against the wall without warning and kissed him to no abandon. He wasn't entirely sure why; it just seemed like the right thing to do, especially considering that he was half-hard from Lucifer's hand having been in between his legs for hours.

Moments like this with him were completely worth losing his job over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know those weren't the right lyrics for that part in Stairway to Heaven. (For those of you who don't know, the correct line is 'There's /still/ time to change the road you're on.') I did that for a reason. It's important to the story. Please feel free to speculate whether or not that was intentional on Lucifer's part and/or what it means. I'll probably explain it at the very end of the story if not enough people guess correctly.
> 
> And as for that scene where he's so angry that he sets an essay on fire, I was actually kind of basing it off something I did once. Well, it's almost exactly what I did. I wrote an essay and my teacher told me I misinterpreted the whole thing so I got really angry and when I got home I had a fit and set it on fire. It seemed like something Lucifer would do, so I wrote it in. (I didn't burn a hole in my carpet or collapse on the ground, though, just for the record.)


	8. Reckless AKA Devil on my shoulder

For the first time in a long time, Sam Winchester was letting his schoolwork slip away from him. And that  _long time_  was the years in between his first year in high school and now.

Ever since one of his freshman English teachers (there had been so many, what with the moving around, but he remembered this one even during his rehabilitation) had told him that he was testing at genius levels, he had decided to put forth all of his effort into school. He had decided that he wanted to be a lawyer and made sure to use his genius to its full potential and score well on everything. All for that dream of becoming a lawyer. All to make it into Stanford.

And of course, we all know how that turned out. Sam had gotten a firm grasp of his dream for barely two seconds before a fire and the tragic death of his girlfriend had ripped it away from him.

After several years of roadtripping and drugs and rehab, though, he had regained that dream again. For the whole summer leading up to his new start at the University of Kansas, he had been excited to work towards being a lawyer again. He had planned on putting forth all his focus onto his lessons and taking notes and studying. Everything those therapists and doctors in rehab had told him about how he needed to avoid relationships and any dependencies had stood in the very front of his mind like rules he needed to remember at all times.

Those rules had stood there for a mere seven hours before he'd met Lucifer, at which point they'd fallen to the ground. Not even brushed to the side, where they could be pulled back to the front at a later time, but just  _fallen_. And Lucifer was the one who had pushed them off the edge.

The extent to which Sam cared about his grades and his future had remained, though. But it wasn't so long ago that they, also, had begun crumbling away, bit by bit.

And the thing was, Sam was letting it happen. He was entirely aware that he was caring less and less about his classes and putting less and less time to actually studying, and he was only trying to fix it at very spaced-out intervals and with small degrees of effort. Even with the most possible effort he could have been putting forth, though, he still wasn't sure that it was possible to get him completely back on track.

He just couldn't make himself care any more. While the extra free hours due to being fired theoretically should have given him more studying time, Sam ended up spending most of that time with Lucifer. And it seemed that the more time he spent with Lucifer, the more difficult it was to stop, even for a few hours to study. He had started out taking breaks from homework to do things with his boyfriend, and now it was more accurately taking breaks from Lucifer to do homework.

What with the way he felt when he and Lucifer weren't close, Sam soon decided that he really  _didn't_  like doing homework. It became entirely worth it to skip out on assignments, and sometimes, with increasing frequency, to skip classes.

Sometimes he thought, for a moment, about how he should start focusing on his courses again in order to stay on the track of still becoming a lawyer someday. Those thoughts brought an immediate pang of discomfort to his stomach, and the stress of thinking about his future became so great that he needed to lay his head in Lucifer's lap and have him stroke his hair calmingly for several minutes. Sometimes Sam told him what was wrong, and other times he just crawled into his lap wordlessly.

"What do you plan on doing once you're out of this place?" he murmured one day while curled up with his head in Lucifer's lap, looking up at him. It was remarkable that he'd never actually thought to ask before, and that the thought had only come into his mind now, while Lucifer's fingers ran gently through his hair.

"I dunno, never really thought about it," he shrugged simply and quietly, as though it were a completely normal answer for someone who was already in college. "I'm only here because I figured it was necessary, and I got a scholarship just for having a deadbeat" **—** he paused to smirk at Sam for his pun **—** "and drug-addict mom, so I figured why not. Gives me a place to stay and everything."

Thinking for a few seconds, Sam decided that wasn't all too strange. After all, as freshmen college students, they still had four more years to decide what they wanted to do, and plenty of people ended up changing their major, anyway.

He shifted and turned his head to face Lucifer's stomach, briefly pushing his forehead and nose into it, then pressing a kiss to the fabric there and making Lucifer chuckle.

"What major did you choose, then?" Sam asked as he slowly sat up, arms draped loosely around his boyfriend's back.

"Psychology. I don't think I'll actually end up with a career in that field, though."

Sam had pulled himself up to straddle Lucifer's lap rather than lie in it, and he was letting his hands slide up the man's shirt even as they spoke.

"Why not?"

Smirking but otherwise acting as though Sam wasn't feeling him up right that second, he said, "Psychologists normally help people. I don't know if I want to take that path."

"What, help people?" Sam laughed, leaning in closer and letting his hands trail down Lucifer's back. He wasn't trying at all not to show signs of pleasure **—** because  _God_ , he loved the feeling that coursed through his veins whenever he touched Lucifer and vice versa.

Lucifer smiled in assumed confirmation and finally closed the distance between their mouths, pulling on his neck and kissing Sam deeply, and in a way that made it feel complete when he pulled away again. "Adhering to what other people  _want_ , really. I don't want to live a life like that, doing what everyone else does and just staying in one place, being a part of society. I just want to do what I want." He then kissed Sam again and added, right into his lips, "And what  _you_  want."

Sam grinned into Lucifer's mouth, and hands slid down Lucifer's back until they reached a spot above his hips that he could grip firmly in order to rock his own hips properly.

"Mmm... You know what I want?" he whispered, bringing his boyfriend's forehead to his. Lucifer just looked back at him in silence, and Sam pushed him back all the way onto the bed before saying, "I wanna ride you, babe.  _Hard_. That okay?"

His face flushed and his cock clearly harder, as Sam could figure by the movement in the pants below him, Lucifer nodded. He looked breathless, and Sam only had more breath to take out of him when he bent down and kissed every bit of skin he could reach.

And to think, just a few minutes ago he'd been thinking about  _schoolwork_.

* * *

It was soon relatively common knowledge (at least amongst the KU freshmen) that Sam had been fired for having sex with Lucifer in the library, but it was difficult, at first, to piece together exactly  _how_  that had happened. Obviously it had to have been Matthew who started telling people, as he was the only other person who knew about it (and he didn't think Lucifer would go tell people), but who the Hell would he have told? He didn't seem like the sort of person to have many friends.

However, it was when Sam saw his ex-roommate in the class they still shared, Biochemistry, that he remembered Adam had gotten information about him before through Samandriel. Because apparently Matthew was a little bitch who just  _had_  to gossip to his brother.

Sam honestly didn't even care whether or not people knew that he had been fired **—** in fact, if they all knew the details and  _who_  had had him up against the shelves in the library, then everyone would be aware whom he belonged to. It was like an invisible brand with Lucifer's name on it, and he wore it like a trophy, especially when he heard someone talking about it or was questioned about whether or not it was true. He loved the look in their eyes when they were very obviously getting the sudden mental image of what he and Lucifer must have looked like going at it against the books.

No, it wasn't that people knew. Sam was angry because he knew that Adam must have told people in an  _attempt_  to hurt him socially or some other way; just the fact that it was done with animosity made him angry.

"Way to be a fucking dick," he wasted no time in saying when he confronted Adam a week after he was fired. "There was no  _reason_  for you to spread it around."

It was in the classroom, but well before the lesson was to start. Others were already gathering to watch **—** if they didn't know Sam's situation, then simply because he was a very tall and intimidating guy clearly starting a conflict.

"Really?" Adam said disbelievingly. "Because it seemed like you were enjoying the attention. Are you telling me you don't  _want_  everyone to know you got fucked against a bookshelf and got caught and then fired? 'S'a pretty interesting story to tell people, isn't it?"

Some of the surrounding people made awkward noises when Adam put it out there what had happened, and Sam heard a couple mutterings of gay slurs badly disguised by coughs. Without thinking and suddenly seeing red, he very nearly lunged for the bunsen burner to hit Adam with it **—** the only reason that he didn't end up doing so was because he tripped on his own foot on the way and, with the mood interrupted, he briefly saw sense. Only briefly.

"It wasn't your story to tell!" he shouted, louder than intended **—** enough that Adam immediately backed up a little. He didn't seem to be a very easily intimidated guy, though.

"And you would have told it? **—** Actually wait, no, don't answer that, because I'm pretty sure you actually  _would_ have. You really would have, and that's fucked up. You fucking  _lost your job_  because you wanted to fuck while you were working, and you don't seem to care, and really all you fucking care about is Luc, who you've only known for like two and a half months, and that's  _fucked up_. You getting angry at me right now **—** that's a start at you getting back to normal. Keep doing that."

The look on Adam's face was both angry and sincere, but the way he pointed his finger was accusatory, and  _that_  was what got to Sam. He didn't want to hear what Adam had to say about Lucifer or his relationship with him, and he  _didn't_  want to be treated like he was a recovery patient all over again.

As Adam was just about to lower his hand and turn around, Sam swiped his own hand forward, grabbed Adam's, and twisted it as hard and quickly as he could as though it were simply a reflex before walking away. He didn't turn around to see the short look of sheer pain on the other man's face as he did so.

* * *

Regardless of what Adam had told him, Sam didn't think he had any reason to care that he'd lost his job at the library. Of course, what Adam didn't know was that he and Lucifer were entirely provided for and literally had no need for outside income. Sure, it would have been nice to make his own money, but it wasn't necessary.

For a little over a week, they survived just fine and with more than what they actually needed before the mini-fridge was empty and they need to go re-stock again **—** as in take armfuls of microwavable food from Crowley's freezer and have him give them each a hundred dollars for personal things.

Lucifer's old dorm (which, technically, was still partially his) wasn't very far from Sam's, so it was barely an effort to walk there together. And even if it was, Sam imagined that Lucifer still wouldn't mind, as he seemed to like long walks if only to have a reason to hold his hand. It was actually pretty sweet.

Since he still had his key, Lucifer didn't bother knocking before going in and wordlessly heading straight to the freezer with Sam. Within seconds, though, they noticed that the freezer wouldn't open because of a lock that was put on it **—** which was immediately disconcerting because there had never been a lock on it before.

"What the Hell, Fergus?" Lucifer hissed at once, spinning around on his heel to face the man in question, who at the same time spun around in his chair to face them. Rather than grimacing at his real name being used, he smiled like he knew something they didn't. "Unlock it."

"Oh, did I forget to tell you?" said Crowley, folding his hands mock-politely in his lap. "Our little deal's off,  _Satan_."

"Since when?" Lucifer shouted, and Sam didn't know whether to become a part of this or take several steps back.

"Since I did that favor for you and got the footage of you ripping all those books deleted from the campus network," he said evenly, standing up slowly and pursing his lips into a stupid little smile that made Sam want to punch him in the face. "See, I didn't actually  _delete_  it, but instead transferred it to my own computer, so now I'm the only one who has it." With that, he swiftly pulled a disc off of his desk with two fingers to show them, and no more really needed to be explained.

"You **—** _fucking_ **—** asshole! **—** THAT'S NOT WHAT I TOLD YOU TO DO!" Lucifer yelled, this time clearly not holding back in the least bit. Crowley was entirely unfazed. "You were supposed to get rid of it! And now you're  _blackmailing_  me?"

If it was anyone but his boyfriend, Sam might have found it amusing that he was acting as though it was the most deplorable thing in the world to use blackmail when he did it himself.

Crowley seemed to find that amusing in an entirely non-theoretical sense, as he smirked wryly. "Precisely. You can't hold my real name over me anymore **—** because if you tell the school that I got in under a false name, I'll just show them  _this_ " **—** he had to pull the disc away from Lucifer's reach just then **—** "and  _you'll_  be expelled as well. And you clearly don't want that, so you two have fun providing for yourselves from now on."

As though this was a completely casual conversation, he then simply sat back down in his chair and turned around in it. And in the next second, Lucifer lunged for the desk, grabbed the disc away, and snapped it while Crowley just sat and watched passively.

"Oh, don't be stupid, I've got it on a flash drive, too," he told him, sounding no more than annoyed. "You'll never find it, so don't even try."

Sam stood next to the locked freezer and had no real option but to watch Lucifer indefinitely break down **—** first, the man was still while everything he felt was evident behind his eyes, but then his tantrum  _really_  started.

"No,  _you can't do this to me!_ **—** GOD DAMMIT, FERGUS **—** " And then, seemingly choosing at random, Lucifer grabbed something that looked old and valuable off Crowley's desk and threw it directly at the window. It crashed through the glass, sending it shattering everywhere within a few feet of the wall, and fell to the ground over twenty feet below. Judging by the lack of screams or yelps of pain, it didn't hit anyone.

"What the Devil are you **—**? **—** No, those were  _my mother's_ **—**!"

Crowley stood up in alarm and started forward to stop him, but Lucifer managed to throw two more things out the window in his rage before he was physically pushed away from other items he could potentially throw. At which point, of course, Sam involuntarily stepped forward and pushed Crowley away from his boyfriend.

The small man (small compared to Sam, at least) stumbled harshly into his desk while Lucifer tried to get past Sam in order to scream and hit at him some more.

"Don't you  _fucking_  touch him," Sam spat, feeling an overwhelming possessiveness as he held Lucifer behind him, both protecting him and keeping him from destroying more of Crowley's things. He closed in on Crowley until he was right up in the man's face, inches away from strangling him if need be.

"Tell  _him_ not to bloody hurl my heirlooms out the window, then!" Crowley growled.

Before he had the chance to say anything else to him, Sam was jerked back by his shirt, and in the next few seconds the door was closed and Lucifer was dragging him down the hallway.

He was almost afraid of how Lucifer was acting and inevitably going to continue doing so, but he was also just as angry about Crowley suddenly having turned on them. So when they were back in their own dorm, Sam was feeling strangely numb about the whole thing.

He had expected Lucifer to start going into a fit and mumble to himself, but instead, he just sat on the edge of the bed and brooded in silence. Sam soon sat with him and pulled him down so that they were lying parallel to each other on the bed. And they just stayed there, the angry mood in the air not dissipating at all.

"I don't want to eat cafeteria food," Lucifer muttered into the silene at some point, frowning at the ceiling and then to Sam. "And I  _don't_ want either of us to get a job." There was a long moment of silence, and then he rolled over to press himself into Sam's chest. "This is fucking stupid."

Sam couldn't agree more.

* * *

Because both of them were college freshmen and therefore had all their basic needs paid for, there was still technically no need for them to worry about survival on a lack of money. Free meals were available in the cafeteria, though Lucifer detested the idea of eating around other people.

And Sam did have money saved up from his job as well as backup cash that Dean had given him, so it wasn't like Crowley had thrown them completely out on their asses.

But Lucifer was still angry nevertheless **—** apparently at the betrayal more than anything, and he didn't look like he was going to let it go anytime soon. To Sam's surprise, however, he didn't start searching the dorm when Crowley wasn't there to try and find the tape of him tearing up the books in the library.

"Knowing Crowley," he began to explain when Sam asked, "he'll have several copies of it, one on his computer, one in a locked box, one in his phone, one in a safe that's not even in the building... I wouldn't be surprised if he's even swallowed one of them. I'd set the whole dorm on fire and leave, but I don't feel like moving all of my books out of the room first."

"And the fact that you had taken all your stuff out first would have practically been proof that you were the one who started the fire," Sam thought to say, his inner-lawyer coming out. Lucifer just smiled at him as though proud.

Rather than expressing his perpetual anger (which Sam  _knew_  he had; he could just tell) with aggressiveness, Lucifer simply became reckless. More than usual, anyway. He clearly had no regard for possible consequences, and in fact seemed to do things  _because_  of the possible consequences. Sam guessed that Lucifer got off on the thrill of taking risks, and honestly, so did he.

Almost every day, now, Lucifer dragged Sam along with him to skip class **—** sometimes from Greek Mythology together, and sometimes he would text him while he was in the middle of a different lesson to come meet him. They weren't all necessarily to go make out or have sex, but instead just to get away from everything and do crazy shit. He was slightly weirded out, at first, by these sudden, impulsive decisions that Lucifer was almost constantly making, but he went along with them and loved them.

Sometimes Lucifer wanted to go take something (sometimes a test he was angry about, sometimes an object stolen from Crowley's room or someone else) and set it on fire somewhere. They would sneak off to somewhere on or off the grounds where no one else would see and just make a pile and set it ablaze, and Lucifer, rather than throwing a tantrum over it like the first time Sam watched him start a fire, or even looking angry, watched with a glimmer of awe in his eyes like it was something miraculous.

Sam always watched Lucifer more than he watched the fire, and he found the look on his boyfriend's face the most miraculous thing. He supposed that he should have had an unnatural hate or fear of fire due to both his mother and girlfriend having died in house fires, but he honestly didn't mind Lucifer's pyromania. At the most, he found it interesting and appreciated the twisted sentiment that came with setting things on fire to destroy them.

In a way, he understood why Lucifer did it. Fire was an all-consuming, indiscriminate force that simply  _destroyed_  anything in its path. Anything, no matter how strong, would eventually be reduced to ash if caught in a big enough fire. And Sam remembered what Lucifer had told him about wanting to step on everything around him. There was no better way to do that than with fire. It was actually kind of poetic.

And Sam felt a sort of satisfaction, too, with watching stolen clothes and books go up in flames **—** but not nearly as much as he figured that Lucifer must have, nor was it anywhere near the feeling he got when he watched Lucifer watching the fire. He looked innocent and powerful and beautiful all at the same time, and that was amazing to look at. Sam often felt like the fire, in turn, was watching him, so as to complete the triangle.

It wasn't even as often as you would think that they ended up kissing passionately afterwards, as all Sam wanted to do was keep looking at him. Pressing him up against a tree and ravishing him would have ruined that.

Other times, when they ditched classes, Lucifer just felt like  _hurting_  people. Sometimes in a not-so-devious way, pulling stupid pranks like putting ketchup packets under all the toilet seats, and then, considerably less often, legitimately hurting people. Purposely tripping a bit while walking up stairs just to make someone else fall all the way down them. Digging small ditches for people to step into unknowingly and sprain their ankle.

Once, Lucifer dragged Sam up to the roof and told him he wanted to drop pennies on people.

He had just laughed, the only thing he'd thought to say being "Why?"

"Because I care not for the safety of others, Sam," said Lucifer mock-dutifully, and then both of them grinned widely.

That couldn't be done as often because then people would eventually start to realize that they were doing it on purpose. But Sam found himself wanting to do that more often **—** even  _suggesting_  it once or twice when Lucifer initially just wanted to go steal something.

He had gone from having to be coerced to do that kind of thing at all to actively wanting to do it **—** in what, a month? Less?

With the sudden thought of that while sitting on a bench after one of those times, Sam felt dread and extreme discomfort drop deep inside him, just for a second or two. It faded away, but he was left with a horrified look for a few seconds longer, and Lucifer seemed to have noticed because he came up from his side and then threw his arms around Sam from the back. Those arms settled gently over his chest, one going under his left armpit and one over his right shoulder. Lucifer arched his neck forward to look at Sam's face and asked,

"Are you sick? You looked like you were about to throw up for a second."

Sam actually laughed, though he wasn't sure whether that was because of the genuine concern in Lucifer's voice or because everything in this situation fit so well.

"Nah, I'm fine, Lucifer. I was just thinking that **—** uh, you're like... a little Devil on my shoulder," he finished in a tone of near reverence. Sam laughed shortly again, smiling genuinely at him but once again feeling something twist in his stomach. It simultaneously felt good and painful.

Lucifer stared at him scrutinizingly for a few moments before letting his look of worry twitch into a smile, sliding his hand up to Sam's jaw, and pulling him in to kiss him. It was a firm locking of their lips together that made Sam's heart leap like the first time he was ever kissed. In about eight seconds, Lucifer pulled away and pressed their noses together.

"I'll try to be a bigger one," he muttered to Sam half-jokingly before giving him another short kiss and tightening his upper-body hug.

The Devil was holding him, and somehow he felt so safe.

* * *

Even on the days that they did sit through all their lessons, they weren't learning as much. Not in Greek Mythology, at least.

Lucifer seemed to have decided that he no longer cared about that course at all (assuming he ever did care to begin with), as he made no attempt to pay attention anymore **—** or perhaps he was just confident that he didn't need to pay attention to pass the exams at the end of the course. Both were equally likely.

Sam, however, was still trying **—** and the key word was  _trying_. "Trying" could mean anything depending on what suited your needs, and Sam was making half-assed attempts to take notes while his mind was almost always somewhere else now. It wasn't ever floating away anymore, though; it was locked on Lucifer. He was just constantly gravitating that way.

One afternoon in the second week of December, Sam's visual focus was on the powerpoint the professor was presenting and the paper in front of him, and he felt like he was doing fairly well **—** until he could nearly  _feel_  the boredom of the man next to him reach its highest possible level. Because what he felt directly after was a hand curving around his leg and rather than simply staying or stroking there, creeping further to undo his pants zipper.

" _Lucifer_ ," he hissed, though not sure out of annoyance or pleasure, "we're in the middle of a  _lesson_."

"So?"

Somehow, Sam had a hard time immediately coming up with an answer for that **—** okay, it might have been Lucifer's hand delving inside his pants and stroking his flaccid cock through his underwear. That was pretty distracting.

"I **—** Someone will  _see_."

"No one can see through the front of the desks," Lucifer countered.

"...There are several people sitting in the rows behind us, Lucifer, oh my God-"

He had to cut himself off to keep from moaning because that hand suddenly had a firm grip around his cock through the underwear, and the pressure was  _amazing_.

"Relax, none of them will see," he assured him, but Sam knew that even Lucifer wasn't sure of that. If he was, then he wouldn't have been doing this. He smirked devilishly and Sam looked at him like he was doing the most evil thing possible.

"Shit, babe, I can't hold back in here," he whispered urgently, once again trying not to let out any suggestive noises.

"Well, that'll be your fault, won't it?"

Lucifer truly did not care how vocal Sam would potentially be about an orgasm in the middle of a lesson **—** that much would have been obvious anyway. But Sam  _really_  didn't want everyone else to know that he was getting a handjob in class, so he used all of his strength to stay silent. The look he gave Lucifer was one of pain, and the look his boyfriend returned as well as the kiss that followed was that of pity.

But Lucifer's hand was relentless. He somehow managed to look perfectly normal, listening to the professor give his lecture and looking at the powerpoint, and also deftly free Sam's cock from restraints of fabric and start stroking to get him completely hard.

Sam was trying to appear as though he was taking notes, but keeping a straight face was suddenly the most difficult thing in the world.

_Aphrodite was born of the sea-foam from Uranus's castrated testicles._

Lucifer pulled, long and slow, and a hint of precum began leaking out.

_Her beauty was such a threat to the peace on Mount Olympus that Zeus married her to the ugliest god, Hephaestus._

He slipped into a steady rhythm of pumping that made Sam want to buck his hips into that perfect hand.

_She was the surrogate mother to Ado_ **—** _nisdfgghgrertgyasdftghgrdgj..._

Oh God, he couldn't do it.

Sam could just barely hold his pencil upright and keep from letting out any loud, dirty moans like he'd have  _really_  liked to, and he was sure that at this point he was flushing a very deep red. Lucifer's thumb ran over the slit on the head of his cock, and he had to bite his lip extremely hard to stay silent and also look normal.

The fact that it was in public and anyone looking straight at him could probably guess what he was doing actually did seem to get him off even more: It was a faster time than usual that he came all over Lucifer's hand, which he wiped on his own pants, and he let out a sharp breath that he quickly had to hide with a cough. His head immediately snapped over to Lucifer, who was zipping him back up and looking entirely satisfied with himself.

Sam would have liked to get revenge and do the same thing to him, but he had a feeling that Lucifer would actually start moaning out loud at some point. So he didn't.

Though he wished that he was willing to, as the idea was significantly arousing to him. And he couldn't think of anything more reckless.


	9. It's about time for a Christmas chapter

With Christmas break closing in and exams coming right around the corner, everyone at KU was in both a study frenzy and a hurry to make plans for the holidays. The weather was cold enough for Sam to add a third layer to his clothing, and even Lucifer was wearing a coat regularly, now. It was such an abnormal thing to see on him that Sam was relentless with teasing the first time that he saw him put it on.

"You look like you're about to go rob a bank," he'd teased, approaching him slowly so he could slide his hands under all those layers.

Lucifer frowned momentarily, but then teased right back **—** "You want to help me?"

While wintertime wasn't bringing any planned bank heists for them, it did mean that the ground was getting gradually more and more frosted over until finally the grounds were covered in snow. So in spite of the fact that everyone's time really should have been spent studying, plenty of the college students who wanted to retain some of their childhood were out playing in the snow. There was also a significant increase in those who came into the campus coffeeshop **—** both for the hot beverages to warm them up and the room to study and hang out at the same time.

Meaning that Sam and Lucifer couldn't be alone as they would have liked during the weekends. Skipping classes during the week was the only way to get any time alone that wasn't in their dorm **—** and most of it still had to be inside the buildings because lighting a fire was fairly difficult in weather  _this_  cold.

So setting things on fire wasn't much of an option for the remaining weeks of December, but they still kept each other warm practically every evening. Sam learned that his favorite way to make love to Lucifer was holding each other tight out of necessity, and under a blanket. It felt domestic and he kind of yearned for that.

Since the exams that would decide which courses they passed or failed were extremely soon, though, Sam's mind was temporarily reverting back into frantically wanting to  _get things done_. He needed to pass the exams, and so did Lucifer, so even they were able to agree that study-time was necessary for the both of them. For once, Lucifer was allowing him time to do his work without consistently singing or otherwise annoying him.

Sam could tell, though **—** Lucifer didn't feel that he needed to study very much to succeed. Several times while going over his notes, he stopped and wondered how high his boyfriend would score on an IQ test. And really, he wouldn't have been surprised if the score turned out higher than his own. Perhaps a little jealous, though.

Then again, he imagined that whatever score he would have gotten would have be lower than it would have been had he never done drugs. Which was his own fault.

_Or Ruby's, really,_  he thought to himself as he shuffled his Biochemistry notes on the desk, fully aware that he simply  _couldn't_  do as well as he used to. It wasn't a problem of being grounded, but rather that his comprehension and memorization skills had been permanently affected by the drugs she had put in him **—** convinced him to put in himself, sometimes.

But even after the theoretically detrimental effect cocaine and heroin had had on him, he still considered himself significantly more intelligent than average. He could still do extremely well on all these exams if he put forth all of his effort into it. If Lucifer weren't in his life, even, this would have been easy enough for him to still manage a job on the side of all this studying.

With Lucifer  _in_  his life, though, he cared much less about eventual success from his second try at college. So he supposed it evened out.

Not very late into the day on the Saturday before exam week, Sam was reading over his Law notes and making a vague attempt to keep his mind on Law and not to let it wander **—** to Lucifer, especially. That did, however, become slightly difficult when shuffling noises on the bed several feet behind him became more and more prominent **—** at this point, too much unlike the normal noises of moving papers around. He didn't have to focus that much to hear heavy breathing and slightly suggestive noises as well.

Eventually, he turned around in the swivel chair to find Lucifer lying on his back, pants unzipped and pulled down so that his hipbones were showing, and a fist directly over his groin. His other hand was underneath his own shirt and seemingly palming his chest.

"Are you... masturbating?" said Sam, knowing he really didn't have to ask. There wasn't much else he could have possibly been doing.

Smiling lazily, Lucifer rolled his head over to face Sam and drawled, "No, this is my new method of studying."

Sam cocked a smirk. "So you're getting off without me?"

"You were busy."

"I think you just wanted to see how long it would take me to notice," Sam said lowly and accusingly, but at the same time leaving the chair to get to the bed and then hovering over Lucifer possessively.

The man below him smiled as though to tell him that he was right, but he didn't have much time to do so before Sam was kissing him and pressing him  _hard_  into the bed. Lucifer started stroking himself again, but as soon as Sam noticed he swatted his hand away and made a noise similar to a growl.

" _Lucifer_ **—** Mmm, just **—** " he spoke brokenly in between kisses, trailing down Lucifer's neck and simultaneously inching the man's jeans and underwear down to his knees.

As Sam began pressing kisses down the fabric stretched across his chest and down his stomach, straight to Lucifer's navel, the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard came out of Lucifer's throat. And then a sound even more beautiful than  _that_  when he gripped Lucifer's hips tight to hold them down and fit his lips around the head of the cock in front of him.

Sam absolutely loved doing this to him. What had been a completely foreign idea to him about four months ago now felt so natural, so _amazing_  that he couldn't remember ever not wanting to do this. He loved having this kind of control over Lucifer and using it to make him moan and writhe and  _try_  to buck up into his mouth but not be able to. And sometimes Sam let him buck his hips up and create his own rhythm, and hearing the increase in pitch of Lucifer's moans when he did that was worth the gag reflex.

Those hands tangling in his hair and urging his head down were enough to get Sam hard **—** just knowing that  _he_  was the one making Lucifer feel like this was making him more aroused than he might have been if he were the one receiving right now. And the moaned whispers of "Mine, Sam,  _mine_..." **—** a habit Lucifer had of saying, now **—** sent him reeling.

He let Lucifer come inside his mouth and swallowed it all without complaint, immediately afterwards moving back up to kiss him again and whisper into his mouth, " _Mine_."

Within the minute, Lucifer had kicked his pants off completely and pushed Sam back up to a sitting position **—** presumably, at first, to pull both their shirts off. But when he had Sam's collar tight in his hands, rather than ripping it all off, he pulled him in just so that the peaks of their sweaty foreheads touched.

"You know what we should do?" said Lucifer breathlessly, his mouth quirking into the sort of smile he had when he would drag Sam out of class and his eyes meeting Sam's with possessiveness and... hope? "We should carve each other's initials into our hands. I've been thinking about it **—** as a sort of Christmas present to each other, you know? It'll be like a blood bond between us. Like we're marking each other permanently."

Something **—** just,  _something_ , deep in the far back of Sam's mind, flickered as a sort of warning sign. Just for a split second. But his voice of reason wasn't there anymore, and all Sam saw was that  _this is twisted, but it's perfect_. He loved the idea and he wanted to belong to Lucifer in that way, for Lucifer to belong to  _him_  in that way.

All Sam did was  _want_ , and though it was now obvious he was passing up sex to do this with Lucifer, he was thrilled to do it. This was going to be better than the sex he might have been about to have.

So he nodded viciously, and the first thing he said was, "Where's your knife?"

Lucifer's smile twisted into a more genuine one at that, as though he was extremely happy and relieved Sam was going along with it. Letting go of Sam and pulling up his underwear, he stood up and hurried over to where his pants were lying on the ground, inside the pocket of which his pocketknife always was.

It was a fairly impressive knife—a handlethe length of either of their hands and a blade with a smooth, rather than serrated, edge. Strangely enough, as far as Sam knew, Lucifer had never used it to hurt anyone. He just liked to use it in place of scissors and occasionally scrape bark off trees for no apparent reason. In the next few seconds, he was back on the bed and had the open knife in one hand and Sam's wrist in the other. And still, he was looking breathlessly happy.

"Do you want me to do it to you first?"

Sam nodded again and splayed his hand out flat to make it easier for him. "Yeah. Just try not to get my blood on the sheets."

Lucifer smirked with a short laugh before shifting himself on the bed to get a more efficient angle and pressing his thumb into the upper curve of Sam's right hand to keep it steady.

When the blade pierced his palm, it barely felt like anything for the first few moments because it had been recently sharpened, and so it was too quick of a cut for his body to register. But then Lucifer began to drag it deeper—that was the only way to get it to scar noticeably and for a long time, especially with a knife that was this sharp. Just like how the dull heroin needle had made that pencil-thick scar in his arm.

It hurt, but it wasn't anything Sam couldn't handle. He was used to having his skin cut open—not only from everything with Ruby, but from his childhood, too. His skin was tough, and  _he_  was tough. He was a grown adult man, in any case.

Less than a minute later, there was a very visible, red mark of  _LM_  on the part of his palm closer to his thumb. When the blood began dripping down past his wrist, he instinctively brought his hand to his mouth to lick it all off. Then he nearly grabbed for a sheet to wipe the excess off before remembering that he didn't want bloodstains.

" _Lucifer Morgan_ ," whispered Sam, beaming at what would soon be scars on his hand.

"Now me," Lucifer insisted, holding his right hand out and giving him the knife, and Sam obliged without even mentioning that he should probably wait until his hand had healed a bit.

He felt slightly sorry that his own initials took longer, but Lucifer really didn't seem to mind. And it was wonderful to see  _SW_  permanently on Lucifer's palm once he was finished.

"This is perfect," Sam muttered, leaning into Lucifer as they both stared at their hands.

"You're perfect," he muttered back, for the moment sounding too sweet to resist.

"...Merry Christmas."

They didn't even wait for the bleeding to stop completely before they were kissing again, and with that Sam figured that he hadn't really expected not to get any bloodstains on the bed to begin with.

* * *

Once Lucifer's initials were properly scarred on his palm, Sam often found himself running a finger along the mark without having initially realized he was doing so. And then he would keep doing it, rather liking the look of a mark of ownership on him, and wondering if Lucifer was doing the same thing at that moment.

Honestly, he hadn't intended at all for anyone else to see him tracing his scar—it just happened.

"Holy crap—what's that on your hand?" Gary asked concernedly, grabbing Sam's wrist when he began to pull his hand out of sight.

"S'nothing," muttered Sam, pulling his hand away again. With anything else of this nature, he would have been glad to have it noticed. He would have wanted people to see and to make sure they knew Lucifer was his boyfriend—but this... felt too personal. It seemed like it was supposed to be a personal reminder and not something for others to see. Sam refused to tell himself that he was embarrassed or ashamed of it, though.

"It looks like someone cut those letters into your hand," Gary told him timidly, and when Sam looked up, he found a stern, worried gaze. "L.M... Hold on—isn't that your boyfriend's initials—Luc Morgan? Did  _he_  do that to you?"

"Shut  _up_ ," Sam hissed, briefly looking around to make sure no one was staring at them now. "And he's not abusing me, if that's what you're thinking. He suggested it and I agreed."

He huffed and turned back around to face forward in his seat, clearly trying to end the conversation, but Gary kept talking, sounding more nervous by the second.

"So you  _let_  him do that? ...Sam, that's... that's  _fucked up_ , man. That scar's not going to go away for a long time—"

"Yeah, that's the fucking _point_ ," Sam cut in sharply and wholly aware of how rude he sounded. "It's supposed to stay there forever. That's what we agreed on. Now if you're done telling me off for something so important to me, you can go fuck yourself."

At that, Gary finally backed off, looking extremely offended and like he didn't ever intend to talk to Sam again. Or at least he wouldn't for the next two hours, because in the next few minutes their Law exam began and Professor Mills was announcing the two-hour test time.

Sam began to endure the testing period with a strange, but heavy uneasiness. However, the pain that surged through his hand when he gripped his pencil tight kept him grounded and eventually made him forget.

Later, Amelia and Lily saw the scars and reacted pretty much the same way as Gary. Even Ava, to Sam's surprise, was thrown off and seem fairly uncomfortable with it.

"It's like a  _brand_ ," Ava insisted, while Lily looked at him with disgust and Amelia seemed too horrified to say anything. "If you love him so much, why didn't you just get a tattoo?"

"It's basically the same thing," he told her, his voice on edge. "Tattoos are just cutting into skin, too."

"Yeah, but that  _had_ to have hurt more," Amelia said, looking between the scar and Sam's face. "That's a really thick scar, Sam. There's no way that didn't bleed a lot. You're actually  _okay_  with this?"

"Yes, I am," Sam said firmly, though some distant sense of doubt made him feel like he might have only said that out of spite.

Everyone at the table was silent for several seconds until Lily finally said, "I don't think I want to be around you anymore, Sam." Her voice was slow and even, as though to make  _sure_  Sam understood, and then everyone was staring worriedly at her. "Luc suggests you repeatedly trick people to make them feel like shit at a party, you do it. Luc gets you fired from your job, and you're okay with it. Luc wants to carve his initials into your  _hand_ , and you let him. What's next? If he wanted you to steal something, I wouldn't doubt for a second that you would do it, even if it was from one of us. I bet you'd even go on a killing spree if he asked."

"Lily, come on—"

"No, Amelia, I won't ' _come on_!' Don't pull a Sam on me and be on his side just because you still have some feelings for him!—It's not safe to be around him, you know it, I know you do."

Amelia just stared at her for a few seconds before returning her gaze to Sam, who was glaring at all of them in silence. He coudn't tell whether she was starting to agree with Lily or not.

"Fine, leave," Sam finally said—more like  _spat_ —to Lily. "I'm sorry that the  _enormity_  of my love for my boyfriend scares you that much."

" _You're_  scaring me, Sam," Lily said after a second, standing up with her tray of cafeteria food. "Until you break it off with Luc, I won't be hanging around you anymore."

With that, she walked off presumably to find a new table to sit at for the remainder of her lunch.  _Talk about dramatic._  It wasn't like she actually hung around Sam more than lunch on weekdays, anyway.

"Are you going to leave, too?" Sam automatically asked Amelia and Ava, staring at them intently in an unintentionally controlling way. For a moment, he felt more like a jailer than a friend. Though really, as much as he wanted Lucifer to be the only thing he needed, there was something deep down in there that did want to keep some of his friends.

Once again, they stared in silence for several seconds before speaking. Ava was the first to do so.

"The scar thing is still a little weird, but not enough for me to be scared of you. As long as you don't end up trying to stab us or anything," she added with a playful smile. Sam then looked to Amelia.

"I... no, I'm not," she sighed. "If you do something worse than this, though, I might."

That was good enough for him.

After he left the cafeteria, however, Sam headed straight to the bathroom rather than his English exam. He wasn't even entirely sure why until he approached the line of sinks and realized that he  _really_  needed to splash some cold water into his face.

Wiping it down with his hands, he opened his eyes and inhaled like a man who hadn't done so in a long time. And then for the first time in a while, he looked at himself—really  _looked_  at himself—and saw a whole new man from what he'd seen the last time. It wasn't any noticeable physical differences, though; he simply felt different. And the cold water had woken him up to realize that.

There was a twist in his gut and something pulling inside his chest, and Sam, for that minute, hated himself. He looked at his hand with sudden inexplicable nausea, seeing where Lucifer had  _cut into him_ —where he had  _let_  him. But he didn't hate himself for the scars: He hated himself for all of this sudden doubt that he felt about his and Lucifer's decisions, and he hated himself for even momentarily being swayed to agree with Amelia and Ava and Lily and Gary that it  _was_  kind of fucked up.

But he'd wanted it, and he  _still_  wanted it. He liked the way Lucifer's initials looked on his skin, and he even liked the stinging pain that came with pressing on them with his thumb. Sam, for that moment, was completely aware of how fucked up it was, but he didn't regret it at all.

With another few splashes of cold water, he washed away the doubt and the self-disgust. He scared it away until the only thing he could feel was how much he loved Lucifer.

* * *

Because his boyfriend had no family to go home to visit (and frankly, even if he did, he still likely would have chosen this), it was no question that he was coming with Sam to stay with Dean and Cas for a week over the break. As their present (and just generally considerate of the budget of a college student), Dean bought the round-trip tickets for both of them.

Lucifer didn't seem to like planes, though. He was noticeably annoyed with all the people packed so closely around him—and he wouldn't admit it, but Sam guessed that he was scared of heights by the way that he refused to sit next to the window. And when an old woman ended up needing the aisle seat next to them, he stood up and very politely and charmingly offered her the window seat—but Sam knew he just didn't want to sit in the middle.

"Hey, relax," he said softly, turning his head and sliding his hand over Lucifer's thigh. "Have you never been on a plane before?"

Lucifer pursed his lips and frowned, suddenly looking rather childishly upset. "Never had a reason to. You know I was never able afford to go anywhere..."

"Yeah, I guess I should have figured... Just try to ignore all the other people, okay? You'll be fine. I've got you."

He smiled comfortingly and leaned forward to press a kiss to his cheek, which did seem to calm Lucifer down. When he moved away, he saw the couple in the row across glaring disgustedly at him—at which Sam leaned down again, cupped Lucifer's face with his right hand, and kissed him soundly. This time on the lips, and making sure that the couple could see. Lucifer only smiled appreciatively when he pulled away, apparently not having noticed the dirty look those people had given them.

When the plane finally left the ground and started quickly gaining altitude, Lucifer was whining about how his ears hurt, and Sam had to try not to smile at how much of a child he was being when he gave him gum to chew on in order to pop his eardrums.

Throughout the flight, Sam had to kiss his boyfriend a total of seventeen times in order to keep him thoroughly calm, as well as endure several complaints from him about how the soda was too watered down, the peanuts were disgusting, there were babies in the back who wouldn't stop crying... At some point, Sam just suggested that he sing to himself to calm down, not caring that he was now risking getting complaints from  _other_  people.

In all honesty, it was kind of nice to know that there was, indeed, something that could take Lucifer out of his comfort zone, but he was extremely glad when the plane finally landed in Los Angeles.

Out in the terminal, Sam spotted two very familiar men waiting for him, and he immediately broke into a smile and tugged on his boyfriend's arm, quickening his pace.

"Sammy!" greeted Dean loudly, grinning hard and approaching with his arms held out for a quick, but tight hug. "I missed you, man."

"You too, Dean," he returned, slapping his brother on the back as he pulled away and stepped back, and then turned to the other man. "Hey, Cas."

"Hello, Sam," came his usual gravelly, though sincere voice. Castiel smiled and kept his hands in the pockets of his old trenchcoat, as every time in the past that he'd tried to hug Sam had turned out awkward.

"Oh—" Sam said with a start, suddenly remembering that his boyfriend was next to him, "Dean, Castiel, this is Lu...cifer." He'd been about to say Luc, as he'd so far avoided, for the most part, having to say Lucifer's full name in front of other people. And he still felt slightly awkward about it, especially when Dean seemed taken aback and said—

"Uh—I thought you said his name was  _Luc_."

"Yeah... it's short for Lucifer," he explained awkwardly, and he could feel the man beside him smirking. "But—only I'm allowed to actually call him that." Sam coughed, almost wishing Lucifer didn't insist on him using his whole name.

"Um. Okay," Dean said after a few seconds, and it was obvious he found that pretty weird but didn't want to say anything. "So—can we call you Satan, or—?"

" _Dean_ ," said Sam and Cas reprimandingly at once, causing him to harrumph and reluctantly put out a hand to shake Lucifer's.

"Well, it's good to meet the guy that managed to win over my brother," said Dean. "I hope you're being good to him."

"I hope I am too," Lucifer smirked, half-heartedly returning the handshake and then holding his hand out for Cas.

"You know, it's interesting that you would be named Lucifer," Castiel told him with a firm grasp on his hand. "My brother Gabriel and I are also named for angels."

"Alright, alright, we can all catch up and talk about our family history later," Dean butted in, putting an arm around his husband's shoulders and eyeing Lucifer strangely. "Let's hurry up and get back to the house. It's a long ride home, and I want to start driving before the evening traffic gets too bad."

* * *

The hour-long car ride was full of Dean asking Sam questions about college and how his life had been and wanting to know how he and Lucifer had gotten together, occasionally being a bit too intrusive and needing Cas to hush him or tell him so. But that was the Dean that Sam was used to, so he really didn't mind. His brother had always been overly protective and trying to be like a second dad to him due to John never really having been there for him. And though he was a grown man now and really didn't need to be bombarded with questions about his life, it had some sense of comfort in itself.

Sam vaguely recognized the house from the last time he'd been there—they had apparently redecorated a bit since then. He and Lucifer were shown the room they would be staying in so they could unpack their things (and make out a little on the bed once Dean and Cas were gone, upon Lucifer's request), and then Dean wanted them all down in the living room before Cas got dinner started.

"Okay, so, Cas and I wanted to wait until we got home to tell you this, 'cause it's kinda huge," Dean finally said after several seconds of seemingly not being able to think of what to say. He'd sat Sam and Lucifer down on the couch like he was holding some sort of intervention, so now Sam was kind of nervous.

"It's very huge, Dean," Cas corrected from beside him.

"Oh, you bet it is—okay, okay," Dean cut his immature remark off due to the look Cas was giving him, and then looked back to Sam. "Alright, I'll just do this fast because there's no other way to do it: Me and Cas decided we're gonna adopt."

"Cas and  _I_ ," both Lucifer, and Castiel corrected at once, creating an eerie effect and a momentarily creeped-out Dean. Meanwhile, Sam was standing up, his face nearly split by his smile.

"Oh my God, that's great!" he congratulated, trying to hug both of them at once—and he truly did feel happy for his brother and his husband. The feeling rushing through him was so pure and genuine that he almost didn't recognize it. "Have you started making calls to agencies, or—?"

"Actually," Cas started, pulling away from Sam and putting a hand on Dean's shoulder, "we have a woman named Anna who is five months pregnant and who wants to sign custody of her baby, once she's born, over to us. She never wanted to get pregnant in the first place, so it's good for everyone."

"So you're sure it's a girl?" Sam looked back and forth between them, noticing how Dean looked happier than he'd seen him in ages and like he might even cry, and especially noticing the way he looked at Cas. It was kind of like a short blast to the past.

"Yup. Got the sonograms last week," Dean told him.

"We had the name 'Mary Rachel' in mind and wanted to know if it sounded good to you," said Cas, his eyes twinkling with almost-tears, too.

Sam could only stare and smile breathlessly for a few seconds before saying "I think that's perfect." At which he immediately felt a hand grip his arm, which turned out to be Lucifer, now standing up and beside him.

"Oh man, Lucifer—sorry, I didn't want to make you feel like a third wheel—or, a fourth wheel, I guess..."

"Too late for that," was all he said, and Sam barely had time to shoot him a look before Cas announced that he should start making dinner; and Dean, that he wanted to give Lucifer a proper tour of the house.

* * *

"So what about you?" Sam asked Lucifer later that evening, closing the guest-bedroom door behind him and starting to unbutton his shirt as he walked towards the bed.

"Hm?"

"Do you ever want kids? Maybe—several years into the future, after college, obviously—you might want to adopt? Assuming we're still together."

"Of course we'll still be together," Lucifer said determinedly, a smile quirking at his lips as he stood up and approached Sam to help him get the buttons undone. "And my mind could obviously change by then."

"But right now, do you think you'll ever want a kid?"

"Nah—another mouth to feed, another life dependent on mine, less money in my wallet, less freedom... The only person I need in my life is you. Why, do you want a kid?"

Sam smiled and shrugged the shirt off, thinking about it. "I wouldn't mind having a family if you didn't. But if you don't ever want kids, then how about a pet? I always wanted a dog, and Dean even tried to get me one once, but my dad never let me keep it."

Sliding his arms around Sam's back, Lucifer inched closer to him and said, "I used to have dogs. They were huge and kind of like guard dogs, but then they killed a neighbor's dog and the city ordered them to be put down." His face was impassive, but Sam detected a bit of sadness in Lucifer's voice, and then he felt it himself.

"We could get big dogs," Sam mused, settling his arms around Lucifer's neck and giving him a small kiss. "But I completely forbid you to sing _Who Let the Dogs Out_. Ever."

Lucifer laughed and purposely stumbled backwards, pulling them both onto the bed.

* * *

When Sam woke up the next morning, he left the tangle of Lucifer's arms, deciding to let him sleep longer. The jet lag had clearly gotten to him more than it had done to Sam. Downstairs in the kitchen, he found Dean making breakfast in his underwear and a slightly oversized ACDC shirt.

"Where's Cas?"

"He left for work," Dean answered gruffly, glancing briefly to Sam and then back to the eggs he was frying and putting an almost worrying amount of salt on. "Luc still in bed?"

"Yeah, he's still pretty tired after the flight. Jet lag and all. Are you just making for yourself, or—?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll make you some eggs," Dean laughed. He scooped his own egg off the pan and onto a plate with a spatula and immediately headed over to the fridge. "How many you want?"

"Three's fine," Sam smiled. He couldn't help but be reminded of when they were kids and Dean would play Dad and cook for him. "Uh—Lucifer'll probably want some, too."

Dean just harrumphed and took the whole egg carton out of the fridge. "So. I have to ask—did you always like dick and just never tell me? Because that would have been  _pretty_  helpful to tell me when I was going through that huge bisexual crisis about Cas—"

"Not really, actually," Sam told him, raising his voice to keep Dean from rambling. "I still consider myself straight, really. Or I would if I could still be attracted to anyone but Lucifer... But I can't. It's weird, you know? I liked women and then I met Lucifer and suddenly I couldn't remember what it was ever like to like women. I wasn't ever attracted to any guys before I met him, either."

"Hm. Weird. But you know how it was with Cas... I did like guys, but I never liked any specific one enough to  _do_  anything about it until I met him, and... yeah. I just think it's weird that you ended up with a guy, too. Dad would probably be disappointed that he's not getting any grandchildren," he added with a short laugh.

Sam agreed and remained standing in the doorway, watching his brother make breakfast for a minute.

"I am happy with him, Dean," Sam said to break the silence, and Dean looked up questioningly. "In case you doubted that, I mean."

"Why would I doubt it?"

"You just seem kind of—I don't know. Wary of him," he explained. "Like you're worried about me."

"Well—yeah, you're my little brother. I'll always be worried about you even when we're both old as fuck. Now sit down and eat your breakfast before this turns into a chick-flick."

* * *

In spite of what Sam had said to him, Dean seemed more and more wary of Lucifer as the week progressed. He really couldn't blame him, though; Lucifer didn't exactly come off as wanting to get to know Sam's family or even for them to like him, and he said some slightly disturbing things sometimes.

They were pretty similar to what he often said around Sam, like profound things about human nature—it was just that Sam didn't realize how weird they actually were until Lucifer said them with other people around. Exposing Lucifer to Dean and Cas was a chore and even kind of dangerous.

Castiel, at least, was trying to have conversations with Sam's boyfriend and learn more about him. And Lucifer did seem to take to him more than he did to Dean—though with two socially inept people having a conversation that was primarily one-sided, things got pretty awkward. Especially when Lucifer threw a possessive arm around Sam or even just leaned over and kissed him right there to show that he would much rather be with him, alone.

A few times, Sam would enter the kitchen or living room to find Dean and Cas close together—not kissing, but talking in hushed voices, and then quickly pulling apart once they noticed him. Sam was pretty sure he knew that they were talking about him, but he refused to acknowledge that to himself or confront them about it.

When it was finally Christmas day, a few gifts were exchanged (Sam and Lucifer hadn't gotten each other anything—the initials on their hands were enough of a gift), and several bottles of beer were emptied. It was probably the most peaceful and friendliest day for all of them, as everyone was steadily getting too drunk and/or preoccupied with festivities to notice anything wrong with Lucifer. Even Bobby visited all the way from South Dakota for a short time, whom Sam was extremely happy to see after so long.

Lucifer wasn't happy, though. He clearly didn't like Sam putting his focus on other people instead of him, and he expressed that each night that week when he pulled Sam roughly into bed and kept such a firm hold on him that he barely had room to roll over.

Sam still enjoyed it—the feeling of being pulled all the way back to the ground after floating away all day. The difference was that now, he didn't realize it when his mind was becoming distant. Having a huge chunk of his old life back kept him distracted from that.

Weirder than anything else, though, there was a strange lack of sex until late into Christmas night.

Sam woke up from a somewhat wet dream in the middle of the night, his arms tightly around Lucifer's chest and his hips rolling slowly and involuntarily forward into Lucifer's ass. He was groggy at first, gradually coming to a somewhat hazy consciousness and realizing what he was even doing, and then after several seconds he started thrusting forward on purpose, grinding faster and pulling Lucifer tighter to him.

After less than a minute, it became apparent that Lucifer was actually awake because Sam felt a hand grab hold of his hips and pull them forward, and then he saw no reason to be gentle. His right hand slid from Lucifer's chest down to his pants, where he took hold of his boyfriend's erection and gave it strokes in time with his thrusts.

When his pants started feeling damp and his moans started getting a bit loud, he put his mouth on Lucifer's neck to muffle them.

"Get on your stomach," he eventually muttered with a low groan, pushing himself up just enough to give Lucifer a wet, messy kiss on the mouth. Lucifer rolled over on command and let out a small chuckle, and then a whimpering moan as Sam positioned himself to lie on top of him and tightened his arms around his chest again.

It was much easier and more comfortable to grind along the cleft of Lucifer's ass that way, but soon enough, the temptation was too great and he really  _needed_  to be inside of him. Leaning down and putting his mouth right next to Lucifer's ear, he whispered,

"Do you have any lube?"

"Yeah, but it's in my bag, across the room," he breathed back. "Just do it without. I'll be okay."

"You—you sure?"

" _Yes_ —just hurry up and get inside me, Sam."

The desperation in Lucifer's voice had him nearly twice as hard as he'd already been, and so he didn't hesitate to pull the man's boxers off and open up his entrance a bit with his fingers to make it easier to push himself inside.

"Nngh— _Sam_ ," Lucifer groaned into the pillow at once, making Sam involuntarily thrust into him hard.

For the next several minutes, their moans gradually increased in volume until Sam was sure, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Dean and Cas could hear them—but he didn't care. He  _couldn't_  care, not while Lucifer was screaming his name and coming into his hand and tightening around him. And either way, he felt that he deserved it. It was Christmas, after all, and he had only had sex with his boyfriend once before during the whole week.

As he rolled off of him and collapsed, Sam figured he could just wash the sheets in the morning.

* * *

Of course, Sam hadn't actually expected to be able to get away with putting the soiled sheets into the washing machine without either Dean or Cas noticing. He and Lucifer were supposed to be leaving back to Lawrence later that afternoon, so obviously Dean would want to be up in order to spend the last remaining hours he had with his little brother.

Right as he set it to wash, the laundry room door opened from the other side.

"Hey, in the future, d'you think you can keep the  _nighttime fun_  to a minimum?" said Dean at once, closing the door.

Sam spun around to face him and automatically laughed a little, feeling a childish mix of embarrassment and giddiness. "Heh, sorry. But you know what, how about consider that payback for all the times I had to listen to—or even  _walk in on_ —you and Cas?"

He folded his arms, and Dean frowned, let out a huff, and leaned back against the door. "Alright, fair enough."

But he didn't leave after that, and they both endured about ten seconds of awkward silence before Sam finally asked, "So is that all you wanted to tell me?"

"No, actually," Dean started, standing up straight now and sounding like he meant business. "I wanted to talk to you about Luc. And I didn't want to say this before because I didn't want you to be angry with me for a whole week while you stayed here, but really, I should have... I don't think that guy's safe to be with, Sam."

"Yeah, tell me something I haven't heard about five times already," Sam spat, trying to make his way past Dean to get out—but his brother blocked him from the doorway immediately.

"And there's my point— _right there_!  _Five_  other people have told you this, and you haven't listened? Sammy, if you don't think you can trust whoever else said this, trust  _me_. I'm your brother, and I've  _always_  been looking out for you. You think I would be having a serious talk with you about this if it wasn't true? Luc's a psycho, Sam! He—"

"How can you tell that just by spending a week with him?" Sam countered angrily, stepping forward and looming intimidatingly over his older, yet shorter brother. " _I_  know him best, and I can look out for myself. You've always been doing this, even once I went off to college the first time—!"

"Yeah, and clearly I needed to! If I hadn't been taking care of you, you might have gone and overdosed and  _died_  just like that chick Ruby did! You have a  _problem_ , Sam—you always have—and you need me to keep you from going in that direction. And look where you've gone, right back to another psycho,  _right_  after you fucking got out of rehab! I can't keep you from being with the guy, but just— _God_ , Sam. Just take my advice as your big brother and stay away from him. I know what he's doing to you, and I  _know_  you do, too."

"Which is  _what_ , Dean?" Sam snapped, his tone biting at the stale, frosty air. He took a long moment's pause to breathe and watch his brother's facial expression change, ever so slightly. "He's not giving me drugs. I'm not stupid enough to go back to that."

Dean was silent but for his heavy breathing for a few seconds, and then he sighed and relented—"I had Charlie hack into the system at KU, just to see anything she could find about you because you weren't calling me enough. And you know what she showed me? Your attendance level's been dropping, you've been slacking on turning shit in—even your exam scores were lower than they've ever been. And  _yeah_ , I know that you had a job, and I know you got fired. For screwing in the library. You've  _never_  done that kind of shit before, and I know it's Luc who's doing that to you. I just want you to get away from him so I can have my baby brother back the way he was."

Sam's eyes had been narrowing all throughout that explanation, and when he spoke, all the anger that had been building up in his chest was spilling out. "So... you had her spy on me. Meaning you didn't  _trust_  me."

"And clearly I had good reason not to!" Dean shouted, and it reverberated off the walls and metal pipes of the laundry room.

"Well if you want your baby brother back, you're not getting him. I'm not a baby anymore, and you know what, people change! I changed, yeah, but that doesn't mean it's bad, and that doesn't mean  _Lucifer's_  bad."

After that, Sam was set and determined on getting past Dean and out of the laundry room, and his younger brother did step out of the way for him this time, but not before grabbing his right hand and turning it sharply so he could see his palm.

"Really?  _This_  isn't bad, Sam?" he yelled, jerking his hand harshly and pointing to the scars. "I saw it before, but wasn't completely sure what it was and I didn't want to ask, because whether or not you think so, I  _do_  respect that you're an adult now and have your privacy. But this—you know who does this, Sam?  _Crazy people._  The last time I heard about someone doing anything similar to this, it was in a serial killer movie. You wanna cut his initials into your hand for him, fine, I can't stop you, but I just wanna make sure you know all I wanna do is help you."

Dean then dropped Sam's hand and let him leave, and Sam was pretty sure Dean knew exactly what he was thinking:  _Well, I don't need your help._

Later that day, when they were all at the airport and saying their goodbyes, Dean still gave him a strong hug, and he hugged back. Yet again, he felt something twist in his stomach, but this time it went deeper and stung worse than any of the times before. And just before he turned his back on them, Cas's piercing gaze caught his, just for a second. It felt like a warning.

On the plane, he didn't tell Lucifer about the fight he'd had with his brother. Sam had a feeling he already knew, anyway.


	10. The Devil made me do it

Neither of them mentioned their week with Dean and Cas once they were back in the dorm. Sam was itching to, though. As sure as he was that Lucifer would get angry or throw a fit or just start  _some_  sort of conflict between them if he did, he wanted to tell him all about the fight he'd had with Dean. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to say about it or why he wanted Lucifer to know exactly what had gone on—he just  _did_.

Perhaps it was  _because_  of the inevitable conflict that Sam wanted to bring it up. He didn't know. And he didn't want to think about it. So he brushed those thoughts off and enjoyed the last several days he had with his boyfriend before the new term started.

During the second week of the break, all the students were emailed their new term schedules as reminders of what they had picked out during the summer, for anyone who might have forgotten. Because they lacked a printer and were now banned from the library, Sam and Lucifer had to go use Crowley's—luckily, he wasn't in the room when they showed up.

Sam only had three classes this term: Statistics, European History, and a more advanced Law class. Reading his schedule brought a grin to his face, as this meant less time wasted in class and more time doing things he wanted. Mostly Lucifer.

_Wasted._  Really, wasted? He couldn't call it that. Sam was going to college so he could become a lawyer—and if he considered time in class time wasted, then he was just wasting his time entirely at college. And he didn't want to do that. For that moment, Sam saw his entire future ahead of him and how much he had to go back and  _fix_ , still, to make sure that what lied ahead was at least moderate success. It brought on a pang of immense stress (and subsequently a desire to cry, but that normally came with stress anyway) and a sudden determination to do make sure to put forth all of his effort this semester.

But for now, he didn't have to do that. Sam stuffed his schedule in his pocket and took a few steps forward to stand behind his boyfriend and squint at the paper he was holding.

"Bible Studies?"

Lucifer looked up from his schedule to find, with apparent, but subtle delight, Sam reading it over his shoulder and frowning. He quirked his eyebrows upward to ask why he was asking.

"You said you hated the Church," Sam explained.

"It's not like I'm going to the class to pray," he said smoothly, folding and creasing his schedule. "I'm just learning about Christian mythology. Which is actually pretty interesting. Besides, God and the Church are two separate things. Church is a business, filled with liars and false prophets and pedophiles hiding under guise of workers of God. Most people who go aren't even real Christians."

As though hovering above the ground and walking on smoke, considering the lack of sound or disturbance in the air Sam noticed he made when he walked, Lucifer moved from Crowley's desk to his bed (his old bed, that is, since this was his old dorm) and situated himself on his back, getting comfortable. Without even trying, he set off a sort of "come hither" vibe that made Sam want to follow him, so, of course, he did so and sat at the edge next to him.

But he was slightly confused—though more so curious—now, as the only impressions he'd gotten of Lucifer's religious beliefs were that he wasn't an atheist, and that he might have believed in an afterlife. There was hardly a time when Lucifer was completely clear on anything, really.

"So are you a Christian?" Sam wondered aloud, sliding his palm over Lucifer's stomach and establishing its spot on the mattress on the other side of him to support himself. The bed dipped and he leaned down farther, propping his other arm up by the elbow.

He briefly pursed his lips as though to think about it, but Sam got the distinct impression Lucifer was doing that for his enjoyment. "I strongly believe that God exists, if that counts…. I  _am_  named after an angel, after all," he added with a mock-innocent smile that slipped into a smirk which Sam returned—he remembered Cas saying something similar, and how Lucifer had even seemed to get along with him the best, for some reason. And splayed out on the bed like that, he did sort of look like an angel. If Sam looked hard enough, he imagined he might see wings traced out faintly on either side of Lucifer's back, or perhaps wrapped around  _him_  like some sort of hug or protective veil. Oftentimes, being close to Lucifer made him feel that way.

As he expressed soft amusement in his gaze and lowered himself to kiss the other man (who seemed rather eager and expectant of it), Sam realized that if Lucifer was the angel in the relationship, then he was the demon addicted to him.

Or perhaps it was the other way around. You never knew.

* * *

Gary was in his new Law class, but not unexpectedly, he didn't choose to sit anywhere near Sam. And Sam really didn't care about being friends with that guy anymore, so he was entirely apathetic.

What he wasn't apathetic about, though, was what little remained of his friendship with Amelia and Ava. He felt the need to preserve it, now—and yet he had been negligent enough to completely forget to get either of their phone numbers or any sort of contact information for them during the entire four-month period of time that he'd known them. It was a new term, which meant new classes and a new time slot for Sam to eat lunch, and it also seemed to mean that he didn't eat at the same time that either Amelia or Ava did.

However, he was also lucky enough to find that Amelia was taking the same European History class, and she didn't hesitate to spend that class time sitting with him. Feeling like he just really wanted to start over and get back on that track, Sam would try to start conversations with her—and he was still perfectly capable of holding intelligent conversations, but while his body and conscious mind responded, his subconscious was too fried for him to keep his mind tethered to his body.

That's what he got for trying to go back to square one. Square one had proceeded to get worse and worse, now that he remembered.

So within the first week, he was already getting distant again. Oh well.

He also no longer saw Adam but for the occasional time that he passed him in the hallways or saw him across the campus grounds. And still, every time, Adam would glance to him with a worrying look for a split second, and Sam had to force himself to ignore it.

Meanwhile, with all the extra time with Lucifer now that he had one less class, he was still getting steadily more and more addicted to him. When it came to the time Sam spent with his boyfriend (which was nearly all of it), life was almost exactly back to the way it was before Christmas break. Or—back before winter started, anyway. Because the ground was still frosted over, and so it was still difficult to set things on fire in that temperature.

Lucifer got restless, though. With no good place outside to start a fire, he began doing so in the dorm or other places inside the building. Most of the time, so far, he just used a normal-sized lighter and lit a small fire on something he was holding and then blew it out before he could burn himself (he did end up burning himself a few times, though—he also didn't seem to mind so much). But Sam knew that if the weather didn't get warmer rather quickly, bigger fires were an inevitability.

Lately, it was more out of boredom than out of anger—and any time that it was from anger, it was now due to Lucifer's new Bible Studies teacher, Professor Michael. He didn't waste a single second when it came to telling Sam how that professor was biased in his teachings and a huge asshole whenever Lucifer tried to make a point or refute something he'd said. From what it seemed, Professor Michael was his most hated teacher, and in return, he was the least favorite student.

"He saw the scars on my hand and told me I was worshiping a false prophet," he told him one evening—not while walking through the door, but instead, several hours later, when they were already in bed together and the lights were out. Sam wasn't asleep quite yet, but the sound of Lucifer's voice still pulled him into clearer consciousness, and he cracked his eyes open to look hazily through his eyelashes at the man wrapped up in his arms. He didn't even have to ask whom Lucifer was referring to—he knew him that well, and his boyfriend just complained about Professor Michael a lot.

"Bullshit," Sam muttered sleepily, shifting in the bed and yawning afterward. "I'm a completely true prophet."

Sam felt Lucifer grin into his skin, and then felt a few slow, soft kisses being pressed to his chest where the grin had just been. There was then a seemingly full minute of silence in which Sam supposed Lucifer might have just gone to sleep for good, but then he stroked his fingers along Sam's arm and mumbled into him—

"You're higher than any God, purer than any angel, truer than any prophet, and stronger than any demon, Sam."

Even for Lucifer, that was somewhat of an odd thing to say right before falling asleep. But Sam felt that he really did understand exactly what he'd meant somehow. Translated back into normal English, it could have been roughly defined as "I love you."

Struggling to stay conscious at this point, Sam shortly lifted Lucifer's right hand from himself and pressed a kiss to his own scarred initials. At that moment, he felt entirely whole. And then in the next, he felt a sharp, and thankfully brief, feeling of guilt and disgust as he gingerly placed the hand back over his own back.

He was too tired to remember that brief feeling by the next morning.

* * *

Sam couldn't do it.

He just couldn't do it.

He couldn't force himself to go back to the way things used to be—he couldn't make himself focus on schoolwork as much as he wanted to, he couldn't remember to spend time with friends other than Lucifer... And honestly, he kept having to consciously remind himself to show empathy for others in an attempt to appear normal. Until he decided, once again, to just stop caring entirely.

Sam had made a far leap forward (or backward, really) only to be pulled directly back into Lucifer's firm, possessive hold. As always. When he really thought about it, though, he understood that he was still the one  _letting_  him. Yes, that was the easiest thing for him to do, and it was immensely difficult not to (not that he was trying or even wanted to), but he did have some control over this whole thing. There  _was_  a rope that he could pull to make it all stop, somewhere. He was fully aware of that. But he didn't go looking for it.

And of course there was no question of why he didn't go looking for it: Because he  _loved_  Lucifer, and Lucifer loved him. They were clearly meant to be together, what with how everything had just clicked and fallen into place— _more like fallen to pieces,_  he couldn't help but think with a wry, slightly sad smile—when they had met. Everything was perfect, so why on earth would Sam want to pull the plug on their relationship?

_Because everything is not perfect._

That wasn't his voice of reason coming back from the depths of his mind; it was just Sam, thinking by himself. He wanted to think that things were perfect because that was the way he felt ninety-nine percent of the time, but he was always aware of that one percent: The times that he looked at Lucifer's initials on his hand for a long time and suddenly could not do so anymore. The times that he felt doubt creeping up on him. The times that all he could think of was all that everyone had ever told him about Lucifer.

It was because of those times that Sam  _did_  have to ask himself why he didn't go searching for that rope, only so that he could reassure himself with a firm, sometimes aloud, "Because I  _love_  him." When he spoke aloud without realizing, he was aware but also apathetic of those who stared at him like he was insane. He was pretty sure that he was slowly becoming known for being crazy, if not already as "that psychopath's boyfriend."

_Most_  of the time he was apathetic, anyway. Most times Sam noticed the stares and the whispers (some of which were, funnily enough, rumors about him having been a drug addict) and just kept walking, but sometimes he felt a surge of emotion that almost kept him rooted in his place or had him confronting them.

But he was also pretty sure that glaring back at them only made him seem crazier.

Even when he was walking with Lucifer, he was occasionally starting to care about what the surrounding people thought of them, now. Sam didn't understand exactly why he would have random bouts of self-consciousness when he had been lacking it for so long due to Lucifer, though, and he most certainly didn't tell his boyfriend about them.

Walking through a crowded hallway with Lucifer, holding his hand (and sometimes his ass)—those were some of the times that the wild doubt would appear. And those were the times that he felt the worst about it and felt the need to remind himself how much he loved Lucifer by grabbing him and kissing right there. It worked, at any rate.

Strangely enough, Sam was becoming the more possessive one.  _He_  was the one who needed more and more of a reminder that Lucifer was his, that he loved him, that he definitely did  _not_  want to search for the rope that he could pull to unravel all the ties between them. And the more he did that, the more he wanted to do it. It was an endless cycle that he knew he wasn't going to be able to stop, but he found himself, once again, not caring.

Other people could see it, too. In the time that they spent together in European History, Amelia called it an addiction—according to the base definition, as she'd put it:  _Physical and mental dependence on a particular substance; enthusiastic devotion to a particular thing._

Sam didn't get angry because he honestly couldn't disagree with her.

* * *

Throughout the month of January, the sex between them was more often rough than otherwise. Lucifer didn't seem at all unhappy about it, though. In fact, while Sam was the one who initiated it more often these days, he was the only one who ever felt unhappy about it. Sometimes, when they were both lying (or standing) next to each other, breathless and drenched in sweat and semen, he wished they had gone slower and gentler and done it more like  _making love_  than  _fucking_. But later, as always, he would get over it.

He just wanted to be possessive, to let there be nothing but instinct and devotion between him and Lucifer when they were in bed together—but it was in a bed only about half the time, now. Sam would press Lucifer up against the wall and fuck him there, or ride him hardin the swivel chair (which was a bit dangerous, but that made it even better), sometimes on the floor without even setting up blankets first. Several times lately they'd done it in the shower, and Sam could honestly say that being pressed up against wet tile was one of the best ways to have sex. If he were the type to talk about his sex life, he would have recommended that to everyone.

The thing was, when Sam was the one who got more possessive, Lucifer tried his best to out-do him. It became a personal contest between them that Sam wanted less and less to be part of as time went on. Lucifer seemed to love it when Sam slammed him up against the wall, and to match that, he slammed him  _harder_.

Once, when Sam had him pinned to the door by his hips, Lucifer's legs off the ground and wrapped around him as he continuously thrust upward, not caring if his groans could be heard down the hall, he made the mistake of moaning his name as "Luce." It wasn't uncommon for him, as it was difficult to moan multiple syllables when you were so deep in pleasure—but he didn't finish, seconds later, with "-ifer," as he would have used to.

Immediately, Sam felt sharp fingernails digging so hard into his back that he actually wouldn't have been surprised if muscle was being torn into. Aware that that was a sort of punishment (as it had happened a couple time before), he involuntarily bucked up harder and higher than he had been doing and corrected himself—" _A-ah_ _—_ _Lucifer_...!"

Needless to say, Lucifer still liked to hear his own name, and he still liked to leave marks on him. And it was apparent that it was getting more extreme by the minute.

If it weren't for how amazing the sex was, Sam would have been a bit scared.

* * *

Despite the fact that there were at least two hours extra in their day together, now, Lucifer didn't try to drag Sam out of lessons any less often.

The key word was  _try_  because Sam had finally made actual attempts to refuse him over text, once or twice. They had been simple things like " _But you'll see me in another hour anyways_ " and " _I should really be taking these notes, though_ "—And it was, indeed, progress because just a month ago, Sam hadn't been questioning him at all about ditching class.

Once again, Sam watched his academic life slip past him with the desire to save it from hitting the ground, but not enough will to put his hand out far enough to catch it. He struggled with keeping up with assignments and paying attention in general, so at times, something inside of him screamed at him to get rid of the thing distracting his will to fix things.

Sometimes he feared that the voice had somehow come back, but then he realized that nope, it was still just him. So now he had to try to ignore  _himself_.

A voice of reason wasn't even necessary anymore. Even after everything, Amelia still consistently gave Sam advice in that he shouldn't be with Lucifer—that he shouldn't be enjoying the bloody nail-marks on his back, or all the time he was missing in his courses, or anything else in his life that was getting royally fucked in the ass by Lucifer's involvement. Rather than flipping out on her or getting angry anymore, though, he sat back and listened to it and didn't respond. He was afraid of what he might have said if he spoke, let alone told her the  _truth_.

Sam didn't do anything about what Amelia told him, though.

On the Friday of the first week of February, rather than suggesting that Sam skip a lesson to go steal something or set something on fire with him or anything else of the sort, Lucifer told him, in the morning as they got dressed after a shower together, that he should join him in Bible Studies class.

"Is that even allowed?" he asked entirely out of curiosity—whether or not something was against the rules wasn't really part of his concern. Sam was sure he could have gotten away with it anyway.

"I have no idea," Lucifer said flippantly, wearing a grin that made Sam let out a laugh and feel the need to dip his head down and kiss him. He did so, and it felt as though he was being physically sucked in enough that it was actually a bit difficult to pull back. "I just think you should see for yourself what the class is like."

Sam knew that what Lucifer really meant was that he wanted Sam to see for himself what  _Professor Michael_  was like. Judging by his boyfriend's tendency to steal things and/or set them on fire from people he didn't like in order to piss them off, as well as how he would be triggered into being unhealthily possessive by the simplest things, even, Sam guessed that this was some sort of plan to spite that professor.

Being part of Lucifer's plans to spite people was always pretty thrilling (especially because it often included a lot of kissing and touching), so Sam had no reason to disagree. He wasn't even missing much of his European History class by going to Lucifer's class instead, so there was barely even any harm done there: After the Bible Studies lesson was over, he could just head straight over to the classroom and catch up somehow. Or just not catch up.

University professors didn't often know all of their students' names and faces (though Sam had a feeling that Professor Michael probably knew Lucifer's like a face he saw every night taped to the dartboard in his office), so he didn't expect anyone to question why he was in the classroom once they got there. At first, at least—and then he realized that if only because of his height, he was pretty distinguishable and therefore easy to tell if you had ever seen him before. But then it turned out that the most he got were some stares—and then a brief, squinting glare from Professor Michael when he noticed him sitting next to Lucifer.

The professor was a dark-haired, clean-shaven and rather priestly-looking man—which was all too fitting for a person who taught Bible Studies. In fact, if Sam had been given the opportunity to try and judge what he did for a living just by looking at him in a completely irrelevant setting, he probably would have even guessed something to do with religion. He was also wearing a look of what seemed like perpetual condescension and a sense of power that he  _really_  enjoyed having.  _That's the look of a man who works in the Church,_  Sam thought, and he figured that Lucifer must have thought something similar and with the same disdain the first time he saw him.

"I can already see why you hate him so much," Sam turned his head and muttered to him. "The way he dresses and holds himself might as well be a huge 'Kick Me' sign."

With hooded eyes, Lucifer smirked charmingly at him and slid his hand over Sam's on the table. He did so in a way that was fairly obvious to anyone who might have been looking ( _cough_ —Professor Michael— _cough_ ), tightly intertwining their fingers and pulling them closer together. Well, they always sat thigh-to-thigh, often even with overlapping legs, when they sat together, anyway.

"I can see that I have a student who isn't a regular in the room today," was the first thing Professor Michael said, looking directly at Sam, who immediately thought,  _What a prick._  Just—God, even his  _voice_  made Sam want to punch him. "And I can only assume that you want to see what the lessons are like in order to decide whether or not you'd like to late-enroll, Mr. Winchester," he added with an edge in his voice, "so I hope you enjoy my class today."

_Oh._  What. Who the Hell did he think he was to single him out like that, and how the  _fuck_  did he know Sam's name? Panicking internally, Sam jerked his head to Lucifer again and hissed, "Did you tell him who I was?"

With probably the most honest-looking expression Sam had ever seen on him, Lucifer shook his head with a mouthed  _No_ ,and then looked both angrily and worriedly at Professor Michael's back. He had turned around right after singling Sam out to begin writing on the board.

If there was one thing Sam knew for sure, it was that Professor Michael definitely did not actually expect him to intend to enroll himself in Bible Studies. He also felt sure that however the man knew exactly who he was, if not due to the news of him being fired from the library, it was by nefarious or at least immoral means. He'd spent enough time around Lucifer to pick up several things on how this guy acted as well as general human nature, and so he couldn't feel more sure.

He might have even guessed that Professor Michael was a sociopath by the way that he acted.

Today's lesson was about the Fall of Lucifer and all the mistakes that humans were supposed to learn from that part of Christian history (if it could even be called that), and Sam actually found that hilarious. When Lucifer, next to him, began to fake-fall out of his seat as a joke, Sam couldn't help but let out a snort of laughter—which in turn got him a sharp glare from the professor and presumably several stares from others around the room.

For several minutes at a time, Sam  _did_  pay attention to what Professor Michael was saying (because honestly, it was interesting, even if the guy was an extreme dick). It was considerably less difficult to focus than he supposed it might have been if he was actually taking notes—and he couldn't, anyway, due to the fact that Lucifer was still holding his hand and didn't seem intent on letting go anytime soon. Not that he was complaining.

Lucifer had paper and a pen out, but it wasn't until nearly an hour into the lesson that Sam realized he wasn't actually taking notes; he was sketching something on his notebook paper, and not even in the margins. Leaning over, he rested his chin just slightly against the man's shoulder and saw that so far, it was a pretty realistically proportioned sketch of a human heart. He was momentarily very impressed that Lucifer had managed to draw it that well without a reference picture in front of him—and then Lucifer began drawing flames consuming the heart, jerking the pen upward somehow gracefully and making them look like much better flames than Sam could have hoped to accomplish.

His smile grew wider as he watched him, and though Lucifer was definitely aware of it, he didn't look up at him or take his eyes off the sketch at all. When he finished the flames, he added some extra shading to the heart as well as shadows and ash around it, and scrawled each of their initials into the heart as though they had been carved.

"My heart burns for you," Lucifer explained dryly when he was done, sliding it over the Sam so he could see it properly without leaning over. "Get it?"

Sam ignored his desire to hit him for the bad joke and instead smiled fondly, whispering, "This is really amazing. Why don't you draw more often?"

Lucifer shrugged. "I don't usually have things in mind to draw."

"Draw me," Sam suggested, only half-joking. "Like one of your French girls."

That resulted in such a fit of giggles between them that Sam was  _sure_  Professor Michael was going to kick them out. Lucifer seemed almost expectant (or hopeful?) of it, even. But all it earned them was another array of glares.

After several minutes of the drawing just sitting there, Lucifer told him that he better keep it forever, and Sam folded it up to put in his wallet so that he could do so. And as a thank-you, he turned his head and leaned in, shoulders pressed together, for what was initially meant to be a short kiss. But Lucifer grabbed his face to keep him from pulling away, and suddenly Sam didn't care that they were in a Bible class and surrounded by people who would probably like to see them hanged for what they were doing. He went along with it for a full minute before finally pulling away again for his slight fear that they were going to get kicked out.

Still, however, they didn't. Sam supposed it might have been because Professor Michael had had his back turned—and now, he was starting to get the feeling that Lucifer was  _trying_  to get them kicked out of the class.

When Sam pulled away from him, Lucifer let go of his hand and moved it, instead, to his thigh. Grinning devilishly, he kept his head leaned in and whispered, "I would love you to fuck me right now, right here on the table... Imagine it, everyone watching and having no idea what to do about it—your groans echoing off the walls..."

Goddamn, Lucifer was  _too_  good at talking dirty—especially in public, when he really shouldn't have been. The mental image swirled around in Sam's mind just enough for him to feel his pants around his crotch tighten, at which he tried to stop because he really did  _not_  want a repeat of the time Lucifer had given him a handjob in the middle of Greek Mythology. As much as he theoretically loved the idea of pulling Lucifer up and laying him down on the desk to have his way with him right there, he didn't think his lack of self-consciousness was that high anymore.

So he could only smirk dazedly at him and mutter, "God, I would love that too..."

Throughout the class, Lucifer kept doing little, yet noticeable things that got Sam aroused and/or earned them some glares. He didn't try to refute anything Professor Michael said, though, as the Fall of Lucifer seemed to be a topic that was difficult to be biased about. At the very end, he announced that he wanted an essay from them about the symbolism behind the Fall of Lucifer and its subtle adaptations in at least two contemporary works of fiction by the next class. Almost immediately, Sam and Lucifer were stepping their way down the middle set of carpeted stairs to leave the room, and the latter insisted on holding hands.

"The air's so thick with homophobia I can practically smell it," Lucifer muttered indifferently, though not so quietly that the surrounding people couldn't hear.

Sam laughed, but his smile faded the moment a large man (well, not large compared to Sam, but somewhat muscled—probably on some sports team at KU) purposely bumped into Lucifer on his way past him and spat, "Devil-worshiping  _fag_." The man didn't even try to hide it with coughs—it was loud enough, in fact, that Sam was almost sure Professor Michael had heard. They were on the bottom level of the room now and no more than ten feet away from the professor's desk.

It didn't surprise him that this bigoted and extremely biased Bible Studies teacher barely even looked their way upon hearing the slur, but it still made him angry. And it made him angry that this guy would needlessly do something like that, and that the others still in the room shot Lucifer a glare rather than  _that_  asshole.

It also didn't surprise Sam that he ended up letting go of Lucifer's hand, taking large and quick strides up to the asshole, and forcibly turning the guy around to punch him square in the nose.

"Shut the fuck up," he growled once his fist made contact with skin and subsequently felt his knuckles burn. That was when Professor Michael actually tried to notice.

And it  _did_  surprise him that the guy didn't fall to the ground, but rather stumbled back, his hand shooting upward to grab his now-bloody face, and then lunged forward to attack Sam in return.

Because he hadn't quite expected that, Sam didn't duck in time to avoid a fist to the eye and ended up stumbling backward in pain as well. But then he was ready for anything, and rather than letting this be even, he stepped forward again and grabbed him by the shoulders to jerk him forward and kick him in the shin, leaving him bending forward and perfectly vulnerable for Sam to pull him up again and punch him hard in the stomach.

He only managed to do so twice before one of the female bystanders (the asshole's girlfriend, presumably) screamed in horror, "Stop it,  _stop it_! He has Mono!"

Upon hearing that, Sam truly registered what he was doing and stepped away, and—shit, if he had hit hard enough and the Mono was bad enough, this guy could die. Part of him wanted to say  _Good, he deserves it,_ but the rest of him honestly could not believe what he had just done.

"I would report the assault, but I believe that's up to the victim," said Professor Michael sternly, stepping forward and looking menacingly between Sam and the asshole now being helped to a standing position by his girlfriend. "Mr. Morgan, Mr. Winchester, I want you  _out_  of my classroom and to never step foot in here again."

Professor Michael pointed to the door, and Sam looked around to see Lucifer behind him, already approaching him with a wicked smile. He completely expected Lucifer to pull him in for a kiss right there, and he let him, holding him around the lower back so he could bend him back and then pull up dramatically.

"Don't count on it," Lucifer laughed in the professor's face before taking Sam's hand and running out of the classroom with him.

He was so visibly happy the whole way back to their dorm, and that made Sam forget for a short while that he had just needlessly beat up a guy who had Mono. But when the door shut behind them and Lucifer sat him down on the bed to examine the already purplish skin around his eye, he started feeling horrified with himself again.

"That was great, what you did for me," Lucifer told him, holding Sam's face in both hands and getting onto the bed to straddle his lap. "I love you so much."

And then he kissed Sam, at first slowly but then it became hungrily—as hungrily as he could keep their lips attached and clutch at his face without touching the sensitive skin near his eye. Sam accepted it, letting Lucifer's mouth wash away the regret, the doubt, and the feeling that the rope he could pull to end this all was right in front of him.

But then Lucifer broke away to begin kissing and sucking at his neck, and Sam couldn't help but ask, "What do you think I should do if that guy presses charges?"

"Tell the police you were provoked," Lucifer mumbled, his voice muffled by Sam's skin, and then all you could hear was a small moan coming from his throat as he sucked a spot on Sam's neck. "Or tell them that the Devil made you do it..." And he supposed he couldn't argue with that.

As though a reward or a  _thank you_  for beating that asshole up, Lucifer continued south until Sam was pinned by his hips to the bed and otherwise writhing and moaning—and forgetting how he felt about all this. Only after he finished and zipped Sam's pants up did he go to the minifridge to grab the ice-tray, find a plastic bag to put the ice cubes in, and put it to Sam's rapidly swelling eye.

"He really hit you hard," Lucifer mused, his lip curling. Sam sighed contentedly at the coddling and the relief from the makeshift ice-pack, and looked up at him without responding. "But at least people will see it. It's sort of like... a trophy. For protecting my honor."

Sam broke into a slightly painful smile at the medieval phrase, and then he felt it break apart piece by piece. He had done something that could possibly result in a guy's  _death_ , and Lucifer just saw this as an accomplishment. Lucifer had probably even intended for something along these lines all along.

Sam was just as scared as he had been before. Not necessarily because of what he had done and how horrible he felt, but because he  _didn't_ feel horrible. That was what really terrified him.

What the Hell was Lucifer doing to him?

* * *

"What the Hell happened to you?" came Amelia's concerned voice the moment he sat down in European History on Monday. She frantically turned around in her seat to get a better look at his black eye, and Sam just sighed.

"I hit a guy for insulting Lucifer, and he hit me back," he said simply.

Initially, that was all he intended to say, but after a few more questions he ended up explaining the whole thing in detail, right down to how that asshole was probably going to press charges—if the Mono didn't kill him, that is.

Amelia was speechless for several moments and just stared at Sam in worry before saying, "Well... do you feel sorry about it?"

"That's the thing," Sam told her, scowling and holding his head in his hands. "I don't. I wish I could, but I don't. I'm not sure if I'm even able to anymore."

He wasn't sure why he was telling her this. Not too long ago, he couldn't have cared less about her, either. But he supposed it was good to have someone but himself and the absent voice in his head to talk to about his.

She didn't say anything else to him—possibly because the lesson was starting, but more likely because she had nothing else to add. Meanwhile, it was the one thing that Amelia was  _not_ , for once, telling him to do that convinced him.

* * *

When Sam returned to his dorm later that day, Lucifer greeted him with a kiss—and for a split second, he was tempted to just lean into the kiss and forget about everything again, but then he reminded himself that no, he could not keep giving in; this was for his own good.

And  _God_ , he didn't want to be cliché, and he didn't want to hurt Lucifer's feelings but at the same time he didn't want to cater to Lucifer's whims even now. He wasn't even sure if Lucifer was capable of having real feelings.

He didn't want to do this at all, but he needed to. And by extent he still must have wanted to, in some way.

Sam took a far step away from Lucifer and swallowed, trying his hardest not to let his throat close up. He frowned and inhaled deeply, really _hating_  the look of innocent confusion on the other man's face and wishing he didn't have to look at it. He wanted to vomit. Or cry. Or both.

"I can't do this anymore," Sam told him in the firmest voice he could manage, forcing himself to look Lucifer dead in the eye. "I can't—I can't let you do this to me anymore."

Rather than looking angry or sad just yet, Lucifer cocked his head and furrowed his brow, taking a small step forward. Sam took another one back.

"What are you talking about, Sam?"

" _You_ , Lucifer!" he yelled without meaning to—and then he wasn't able to stop. "You have been  _ruining_  me ever since you met me. I've missed so many classes because of you that my scores are lower than ever, I've lost nearly all my friends, my job, and even the trust of my own _brother_  because of you—Fuck, Lucifer, I was so crazy for you that I've literally  _gone_  crazy! Your initials are carved into my skin, and just a few days ago I probably fucking got myself into assault charges—I might even have fucking  _killed_  a guy, and you know what?—I don't care! I literally do not care that I hurt that guy so badly; do you realize how fucked up I am now? Because of  _you_? You've changed me so much, Lucifer, and I don't want it anymore. I don't want you in my life anymore."

For what felt like the longest time, Lucifer simply stared at him, his eyes looking emptier and emptier by the second, and his fists clenched. Then he finally said, in an eerily smooth and quiet, yet powerful voice, "Yes, I changed you, but that doesn't make it  _bad_. You did change because of me, but you would have done it anyway, Sam!"

Cringing at the use of something he'd said to Dean, Sam inhaled shakily. "...What are you talking about?"

"Do you know why I sat next to you on the first day, Sam?" said Lucifer, a slight shake in his voice as he stepped closer to Sam—and this time, he didn't back up. Lucifer's face seemed trapped forever in a deep, questioning frown. As he spoke, he was bent slightly forward and making incessant hand gestures... almost like he was pleading. "I walked into the classroom, and I saw you—I saw a man who looked  _lost_ , like he was looking for something. And then when I sat down... Sam, I could  _see_  you. For exactly what you were. I saw that you were a recovered addict who was lying to himself because no one ever  _really_  recovers, and I saw exactly what you needed. You needed  _me_ , Sam."

At that point, Lucifer was close enough that he could have touched Sam if he wanted—but he didn't, and for that Sam supposed he was grateful.

"Exactly!" he yelled once he was sure his voice wouldn't get caught in his throat, thrusting his arm out wildly in a frantic gesture. "I got _addicted_  to you, Lucifer—that's not healthy! People aren't supposed to be addicted to other people—"

"Who  _cares_  what people are supposed to do?" Lucifer shouted back, finally looking angry. And just a bit broken. "No one is like you and me, Sam. We're just alike and we're different from everyone else, that's why I need you—"

"I am  _nothing_  like you," Sam spat, stepping just a bit forward and looming over him. "I never used you like a tool to get what I wanted, and I would never have done any of these things if not for you. You know, some people are just meant to never be in a relationship, and you're one of them. You're a  _psychopath_ , Lucifer."

For a few seconds of silence, Lucifer looked a mix of fear and pity. And then he dropped his voice and said, "So are you, Sam. You just needed the right person to show you that. I already told you that I would never trick or deceive you—I never made you do  _anything_  you didn't want to do. And I  _know_  neither of us could ever be in a proper relationship with anyone. That's why we're meant for each other, Sam!"

"You also told me that you wanted to build me up," said Sam accusingly through gritted teeth. "But everything you've ever done has done nothing but hurt me—all you've done is broken me down piece by piece until I became...  _this_! I don't even know what you turned me into, Lucifer, but whatever it is, I hate it, it's wrong—"

"It's  _you_! You were like this the whole time, and you know it. I would bet even your brother knows it—"

" _Don't_  bring Dean into this—"

"—and you  _love_  being like this! I ground you, and you need it—and you love how much you need it. You're scared of how much you love it, I understand that. But you don't have to do this. I need you, too, Sam... I love—"

"No." That was all he said for several seconds, which he used to breathe and just try to think as he stared at Lucifer. Lucifer stared back, looking suddenly broken. "No, you don't. You can't really love me. Not in a healthy way. You have some sick fascination over me—or a sense of ownership, I don't know, but that's  _not_  love. If I stay with you... it'll be like pile-driving myself straight into the ground. I—I love you so much, but I need to stop. I won't let you ruin me anymore."

The following silence was physically painful to bear, but not quite as painful as it was to watch Lucifer shake his head like he wanted to pretend this wasn't happening, reverting back to innocence, seeming like he was about to throw a fit... but then he didn't. He just looked sadly at Sam and stepped closer.

"No... no, you don't understand, Sam. You can't do this, as in you can't handle it—I know you can't. You  _need_  me..." When Sam said nothing and instead bit back everything he could have said, Lucifer reached forward until both of his hands were softly holding Sam's face. "Please... don't leave me. I need you, and—I don't care what you say I can't do because I'm a psychopath— _I love you_. Sam, please. Let me fix you."

Even after everything, Sam felt safer with those hands caressing his face, and all he wanted was to lean into them, to accept Lucifer's offer and forget this altercation ever happened, to apologize and kiss him so deeply that they both forgot who they were... But he couldn't allow himself to do that. This was an addiction he was facing, here, and even giving Lucifer one last kiss would have just made everything worse.

"...Stop," he choked out after a while, forcing his mouth to stay rigid and his eyes to stay dry. "Please, just stop. You've done enough. Just—get out. Get out of my dorm, get out of my life, and leave me  _alone_."

It was almost impressive how many facial expressions Lucifer managed to go through in three seconds. For a moment Sam thought he was going to get angry and start going ballistic, and then in the next he thought he might have been about to cry. And then he just looked as charming as ever, all smoke and rough edges—but Sam wasn't fooled anymore. He had gotten too close and learned how deceptive the smoke was; and dangerous, the rough edges.

Lucifer blinked and began to let his hands slide away, and Sam thought he was about to kiss him before he remembered that, even as the psychopath that he was, he never did anything without consent. Instead, the man just raised his hand to Sam's hair, let it slide fondly all the way to the tips that touched his shoulders, and then let go of him completely.

For the last time, Lucifer didn't meet Sam's expectations, and rather than saying something cryptic or philosophical or even a parting "I love you," he simply turned his back on him and left. The slam of the door resonated behind him, and all Sam could do was remain where he stood and stare.

And for what felt like the first time in forever, he felt alone and entirely untethered to the ground.

There was another part to the definition of an addiction that Sam knew—it was there in the back of his mind as he stared at the door, and he knew he couldn't ignore it:  _Unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse effects._


	11. I'm so happy for your loss

It was the lack of anyone else in his bed that woke Sam up. The moment he was the tiniest bit conscious, he reached out expecting to find skin, to have a man in his arms, or to feel breath ghosting on the back of his neck and a cold chest and stomach fitting perfectly into the curve of his back. But instead he found nothing on all sides of him, and it felt like going to sit down but then finding that someone had moved your chair a moment too late and falling with a graceless  _crash_  to the floor.

Sam didn't fall off the bed and land on the floor, but he shot up feeling like he had hit something hard. For a moment, he squinted at the blankets that had been kicked to his feet and were now falling off the edge of the bed, horribly confused but not quite aware why. When it dawned on him what was missing, he remembered what he had done last night and wished desperately that he could forget it.

He hadn't wanted to do that, he really hadn't. In all honesty, pushing Lucifer away from his life had felt like ripping off one of his limbs. It would be almost impossible to function without that limb at first, but he would eventually make do and learn to live with the handicap.

Except no, he didn't need Lucifer that way. Sam needed Lucifer like you needed a drug—you felt the lack of it in your veins weighing down on you, and it made you not want to ever do anything else unless you had the drug. Not having Lucifer anymore was not a physical issue, but a mental one.

The only thing he felt as he headed to the bathroom and simultaneously stripped himself of his pajamas was  _regret_ , and he attempted to wash that away with the cold water. It worked in the sense that it was freezing enough to shock him into feeling completely grounded and not at all dependent on Lucifer just for those few minutes that he needlessly hurried to shampoo and condition his hair, scrubbing it out of his scalp so hard that it hurt—and really, he needed the pain because it reminded him even further where he was and that he was  _real_.

He knew it wasn't going to be easy. But it was necessary, wasn't it? Now he could really start over again.

Except he couldn't. Not really. There were things that were irreversible, like the initials that were permanently carved into his hand, his exam grades from his first term that were set in stone, and the fact that he was fired and banned from the campus library, and all those things that he had stolen and destroyed with Lucifer as entertainment... and a guy who had Mono and whom he could possibly have killed by practically beating the shit out of him. Sam couldn't fix those. He could never erase the scars from his hand, and he couldn't stop his reputation from being "the guy who got fired for fucking in the library"—probably not even from being "that psychopath's boyfriend." And with everything that he had destroyed... well. He wasn't God. He couldn't create them over again.

But he could try his best to fix what he could, and that was the point. Removing Lucifer from his life was like removing a tumor; it would keep things from getting worse, at the very least. Sam hoped so. And he kept trying, in his mind, to refer to Lucifer as a tumor so that he didn't associate the man with anything good. Because doing so wouldn't help his case.

Sam was already suffering. But he accepted the feeling of loss and pain because it was necessary. To  _purify_  him, if you will. He accepted it like one would accept contrast into their veins while getting a tumor removed. For a short time, even, he could very clearly remember himself lying in a hospital bed after getting drugs pumped out of him. That was precisely what he felt like—a weak patient, dependent on the drugs even while they were leaving his system and knowing for a  _fact_  that he was going to end up shooting himself up again afterwards. It was a huge circle that he'd been through several times, and he was vaguely aware that he was in the middle of that circle right now.

And he ignored it. This was the first time that he'd ever actually told himself,  _No, I'm not going to do it again. I'll stop this time, I swear._

He supposed that was a reason to be proud of himself.

Sam didn't notice that he was dressing himself until he was finished—and luckily, he didn't find himself with his shirt on backwards or in some odd match of clothes, but just his favorite plaid shirt and his good jeans. After a minute, he recognized it as the outfit he'd worn on the first day... the day he'd met Lucifer. He promptly changed.

A mug of searing hot coffee would have done him some good, but Sam didn't want to walk down to the campus coffeeshop due to the fact that Lucifer could have very well been there, and just that he didn't need any reminders of the man at the moment. He needed to wean himself. God, he wished he'd gotten a coffee maker for the dorm... All he had were a box of Nutrigrain bars, a few things of top ramen, and a case of beer. A beer sounded pretty good, too, but it was eight in the morning, for God's sake. He would just have to get a tasteless breakfast from the cafeteria.

It wasn't until after Sam was completely ready to go that he noticed that Lucifer's pile of books, as well as his laptop, were still on the floor. He hadn't taken them when he left or even mentioned that he would be back to get them—well, he hadn't said  _anything_  when he'd left. Not even goodbye. Sam guessed that Lucifer didn't want to believe that he was actually being told to leave Sam's life for good. And he probably wanted to leave his stuff here in case Sam ever decided to let him come back—but Sam couldn't let him do that. He wasn't going to let that psychopath manipulate him even after he was gone.

In anger and frustration (and probably some other feelings that Sam neither wanted to nor was able to identify), he gathered all the scattered books in a box that Adam had left when he'd moved out, put the laptop and its charger in there too, and carried it with him out the door. Sam knew the directions to Lucifer's dorm so well that he didn't even really have to pay attention to where he was going to get there. There was a slight bit of anxiety inside him that he would have to see Lucifer again so soon, which he knew would bring up feelings and probably even had a chance of making him want to take it all back even more than he already did. But he had to get this over with.

Shifting the heavy box (not very heavy for him, though) to one arm, Sam knocked on the door. He remembered that Lucifer had had a key made for him to be able to go in there anytime he wanted—and though Lucifer would likely accept him were he to step right in like he lived there, Crowley most certainly wouldn't, and he didn't want to make any insinuation that Lucifer was still part of his life. He made a mental note to get rid of that key.

The door was opened by Crowley, who looked fairly grumpy as well as sleep-deprived. His eyes were initially level with his own head, and then they traveled quickly up Sam's chest and neck until they reached his face, and he frowned.

"Your boyfriend came in here last night and immediately took my computer and threw it out the window—and then he refused to say anything to me, and he left the dorm again in the middle of the night with no explanation. What the  _bloody_   _fuck_  did you do?" he demanded, the morning-scratch in his voice.

"I broke up with him," Sam said simply, not at all surprised by Lucifer's extreme reaction to being forced out of his life. "I just wanted to—uh, give these back. He didn't take them with him." He shook the box slightly to indicate that he was returning it.

Though he expected something along the line of "Good on you for getting rid of him" as a reaction from Crowley, what he got was a scowl and a "You realize that he's going to continue to take this out on  _me_?"

Sam almost scoffed at him for seeming to think that he might actually care. He was still a despicable person, and frankly, he deserved what he got even though Lucifer didn't quite deserve to be taking his anger out that badly. Besides, the guy was rich. There probably wasn't anything he couldn't replace.

"Not my problem," muttered Sam as he pushed past Crowley and set the box down next to Lucifer's bed. Without a goodbye or even a nod to the other man, he made to leave immediately afterwards—but there was a loud, accented warning from behind him:

"It  _will_ be your problem soon enough, Moose. He's not going to give up on you anytime soon!"

* * *

Amelia was extremely glad to hear about what he'd done, but Sam couldn't feel nearly as happy about it as she did. He explained as much as he could of what had happened the night before without giving away too many details—it was actually quite painful to remember the specific things he'd said. They were hurtful and they had been meant to sting Lucifer so badly that he would want to leave, and yet it had taken so much... and that broke Sam's heart. At that thought, he vaguely toyed with the idea that all Lucifer was was a broken man and that he _deserved_  love—

Stop it,  _no_. He couldn't let himself think like that.

"I'm so proud of you, Sam," she beamed at him, placing a soft hand on his shoulder and squeezing it in congratulations. He thought for a moment that he didn't want her to touch him but couldn't bring himself to say so or even flinch away; he didn't have the will. "It's not easy getting out of an abusive relationship. You're strong for this—you know, I hear that it's the abuse that gets addicting, that people in abusive relationships keep going back because the abusers trick them into believing that the deserve it, or—"

"It wasn't abusive," Sam cut her off, sounding sad but not quite realizing it until she stared at him like one would stare at an animal caught in a trap that they knew they couldn't help. "It was never abusive. He never insulted me, or made me feel unworthy of anyone else, or hurt me physically in any way, or made me do anything that I didn't want to do. Everything was my own fault," he finished with a sigh, turning away from Amelia to grab paper from his bag that he probably wasn't even going to write on and silently declaring that conversation over.

_He wasn't addicting because I thought I couldn't do better than him,_ he added in his mind, and he was never in a million years willing to say this to anyone but himself.  _He was addicting because I needed him._

Amelia had texted Lily during the period, and apparently she was so excited to know that Sam had finally rid himself of Lucifer that she'd left her own class early so that she could be outside of European History when it ended to give Sam a hug and tell him that she forgave him.

"I knew you had to come around eventually," she told him after letting go, which was a huge relief for Sam. He really didn't want anyone to touch him yet. Everyone needed to lay off of him for a few days, seriously. "I'm sorry for being kind of—well, a bitch. I was just—"

"Looking out for me, I know," he finished for her, giving a small nod of understanding that could also be interpreted as the fact that he no longer wanted to hear that phrase. "Everyone was, apparently."

"So, uh—we should catch up later," Lily said awkwardly, frowning slightly at Sam. "We all definitely need to catch up. Oh—Sam, tell me your number so I can put it in my phone."

"Yeah, me too, said Amelia, and already they both had their smartphones out and ready to add him as a contact.

Part of Sam thought that spending more time with Amelia and Lily would be really good for him in trying to patch the pieces of his life back up and start over again, but another part of him felt like he had no choice when he told them the number for his cellphone. As soon as they both confirmed that they had it in their phone, Sam made an excuse to walk away even though he actually had a full two hours before his next lesson and headed straight for the closest men's bathroom.

There were three other guys washing their hands at the sinks, but Sam didn't care. He took the first open sink he could get to without any regard to how close the other guys were to it and turned the knob on cold, waited approximately two seconds, and splashed a handful of freezing cold water into his face. The other men's stares were briefly on him, but he still  _really_  did not care. Sam had needed that.

Just then, his phone vibrated in his pocket—once, then twice. He pulled it out with sudden worry (and relief, which he really needed to  _stop_ feeling), having assumed by habit that it was going to be Lucifer. But neither of the numbers that showed up were in his contacts, and he only remembered as he opened the texts that he had given Amelia and Lily his number only minutes ago. Rather than saving them in his contacts immediately, Sam set his phone down on the counter above the sink and splashed himself again.  _That should do it._

It occurred to him, when he picked up the phone again, that Lucifer's number was still among his three other contacts, still with that little heart he'd added to it. Sam's first thought was to delete it—but as soon as he had his thumb hovering over the  _Edit_  option on the contact, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He knew how much further ahead in fixing his life it would have put him, but he could  _physically_  not allow himself to delete. It was as though his thumb was locked in place. He couldn't even get himself to delete the heart off the name.

_Best just leave it alone,_  he relented, locking his phone and sticking it back in his pocket. Besides, Lucifer hadn't tried to text or call him since last night as of yet, and if and when he did, not having the contact wasn't going to keep him from doing so. With that thought, Sam ended up going through the entire day in paranoia that Lucifer was going to text him and ruin everything in one fell swoop.

* * *

It had been like his first day at KU all over again, as Sam felt as lost, as transparent, and as untethered to himself as he had on the beginning of that day. The difference was Lucifer—it was, essentially, the version of his first day where he never met Lucifer. Of course, knowing the man for so long and getting so attached had affected him, but not much differently than the drugs had. So Sam didn't have to think very hard to realize where his life might have gone, had he never met Lucifer. He'd probably have remained like this the whole of the school year, unable to feel solid and like he was even on the ground.

More than likely, though, it wouldn't have been this bad.

By the time Sam made it to his dorm at the end of the day after eating dinner in the cafeteria, he still hadn't received any texts from Lucifer or even seen him anywhere, which he found fairly suspicious. He'd expected to be getting texts from him asking to take him back and to be at least seeing him places, possibly following him around. Perhaps Lucifer  _was_  following him around but was just very good at it. He didn't know how he felt about that possibility.

When he opened the door to his dorm, Sam automatically felt that something was off. For a moment he panicked that Lucifer was waiting in there for him or something and checked frantically around the room, but there was no one there. It wasn't until he closed the door and stepped further into the dorm that he realized—the bed was made, and there was a piece of perforated notebook paper sitting in the very middle of it. There was no question of who had done this, if only because, as Sam just remembered, Lucifer was the only other person who had a key to to room.

Without getting angry or panicking just yet, Sam approached the bed and picked up the paper and read it against his better judgment:

_Trying to be normal won't do you any good, Sam. You aren't meant to synthesize with the rest of them. Society will screw you over, but I'll always be here for you._

That was it. Lucifer hadn't even signed his name on it. For several seconds, Sam simply stood there and stared at the note in confusion. What was the point in doing this when he could have just texted him? ...Then again, Lucifer was always one for being unnecessarily dramatic. Especially when he wanted to make a point. There was probably some sort of symbolism with him coming into his dorm and making his bed or something.

And then, before he had the chance to find himself legitimately considering the note, Sam quickly crumpled it up into a ball and tossed it across the room. But the sight of Lucifer's handwriting was enough to make Sam already begin to miss him immensely, and there was a painful twist in his gut as the paper left his hand. It was as if the note itself had made him feel grounded, just for a moment, like it was one last thing for his addiction to hold onto. Like how people who tried to quit smoking just ended up sucking the nicotine stains off their fingernails.

It took Sam over a minute of sitting on the edge of his bed and staring blankly at the opposite wall to decide that he wasn't going to let himself live off the leftover pieces of Lucifer.

God, he needed a beer.

* * *

Dean had surely been on his mind very soon after Lucifer had finally left the dorm, but Sam decided that he didn't want to tell everyone in his life about the break-up at once. Because as much as he wanted to consider it quitting a drug, or removing a tumor, or  _getting the poison out of his system_ , it was still technically a break-up. Metaphors aside, that's what it was.

Most of the time, break-ups were sad. You refrain from telling your friends and family about it until they notice that you look sad, and then you break down and tell them what's wrong, and they console you. Even if you were the one who had to break up with the other person—it was still sad. It's still the end of a relationship. They tell you that the other person wasn't good enough for you, that there are other fish in the sea, that there's no use giving up hope because of the loss of one relationship, and that you can be independent without a relationship and still be happy.

And then sometimes they were a victory. The other person was abusive, or they cheated on you, or they were just such a jerk that you've wanted to break up with them for a long time because they're harmful or because you know that they don't deserve you and they  _deserve_  to have their heart broken. The people who care about you urge you to get rid of that person and when you finally do it, you feel great, and you feel powerful, and everyone around you is so happy for you.

Sam supposed that his break-up with Lucifer should have fallen into that second category, and everyone around him seemed to think so, but it didn't. It didn't quite fall into the first one, either. No one around him seemed to even consider the possibility that Sam didn't feel happy, that he wasn't glad to break Lucifer's heart. That was partially because he wasn't even sure whether Lucifer ever  _had_  a heart in the first place, but that was besides the point. No one considered that just  _maybe_ , he didn't see it as a victory—he saw it as him quitting Lucifer because he needed to, because he knew his life would be better in the long run.

But it had only been two days, and the loss was still hard on him. No one was making it any better by congratulating him.

" _I'm so happy for your loss_ ," was what they were all  _really_  saying, though they didn't realize it initially. Sam was sure they saw it in his eyes or heard it in his voice, later, how he seemed to be missing something.

Day two without Lucifer. Progress: so far no skipped classes, no laws broken, two friendships repaired. In a sense.

Once again, Sam found himself in the men's bathroom, splashing water in his face, and he was still distant from the rest of the world no matter how much he tried not to be. And a couple times, he ended up pulling out his phone to check if Lucifer had texted him despite not even having felt it vibrate, only realizing exactly what he was doing when he had already opened his  _Messages_  folder.

But he did suppose, after splashing cold water on his face for the first time on Wednesday, that he did feel slightly better, slightly freer. He had to remind himself that this was going to be a gradual thing—Rome wasn't built in a day, and drugs were not quit in a day.

When Sam finally called Dean during the two-hour break he had in between classes that day, his big brother was extremely happy. He had to wonder whether it was for  _him_ , or for himself. As much as Dean always pushed that "caring big brother" thing ever since they were young and he'd had to take care of Sam when their dad couldn't, it was clear to Sam that it wasn't an entirely altruistic thing. Dean didn't look out for him ultimately just because he was his younger brother—he did so because John had made him feel responsible. If Dean hadn't gotten some weird big-brother complex from his daddy issues, he more than likely wouldn't have cared this much.

Dear God, he had listened to way too many of Lucifer's psychology rants.

It really was true, though. Just because he wanted Lucifer out of his life didn't mean he had to demonize every opinion the man had ever had. Dean was happy because now he could feel like he hadn't let him or their deceased father down.

"I knew you would do it eventually, Sammy," he told him, pride for his little brother in his voice. Yeah, everyone seemed to have known that. "You always make the right choices in the end. Always have."

"The last time we talked, you told me that I've always had this problem," Sam was unable to keep himself from saying nonchalantly into the phone. All he could hear on the other line for several seconds was static.

"I'm sorry I said that," Dean finally said, his voice lower and gruffer and genuinely apologetic. "I shouldn't have. But I mean it, Sam, I'm glad you finally came to your senses. Just don't go blaming yourself for anything, alright? There are always people like him who are nothin' but poison to the people around them, and you just happened to get caught in it."

_No, you should have said it,_  Sam wanted to tell him.  _I do have a problem and it_ was _my fault._ But he wasn't going to have that argument with his brother while mending their relationship, not now, probably not ever.

"Thanks, I really needed that. So, uh—" He felt the need to change the subject. No reason to talk about Lucifer more than he needed to. "How's Cas?"

"Cas? He's fine. And, well, he was really worried about you, too. Almost more than I did—I mean, he could somehow tell just how bad Lucifer was before I could, even. And then once he tipped me off, I started to notice it more and more... He's just got a sense about those kind of things, you know? He'll be really happy to know you got rid of him. Just, uh, know that he might call you later after I tell him. He'll probably want to say stuff to you personally and whatever—"

"So have you got any news about the girl you're adopting?" Sam cut him off in attempt, once again, to steer away from the topic of Lucifer.

"Oh—we got updates on the ultrasound and so far she's lookin' to be perfectly healthy, which is great, but that's it," said Dean, and though he tried to make it sound like no big deal, Sam could hear the happiness and relief in his voice. It was actually pretty good to hear. A nice break from all the emptiness he'd been feeling in the past couple days.

"You ready to be a dad?"

"Nervous as Hell," Dean laughed. "I'm kind of afraid I won't make a good one, that Cas is gonna have to take care of her more... but I want to do it. So much. I want to take care of a kid and be a great dad to her and tell her that I'll always accept her no matter what, and that she doesn't owe anything to me, and basically the exact opposite of what Dad did. I just wanna show him that I can be a better dad than he ever was. Is that a selfish reason?"

"'Course not," Sam assured him. "You want to raise a person to be better than the man you are. That's pretty honorable—even Dad would have to commend you, really."

"Ha, thanks. Well—I gotta go, Bobby's getting impatient. Promise me you'll visit us, Uncle Sammy?"

He laughed at the prospect of being called that by his future niece, and then at the idea of Dean making fun of that title—"Augh-shut  _up_. But yeah, I promise."

Dean's grin was practically audible as he hung up, and Sam stuffed his phone back in his pocket with a sigh. That had been a nice break from everything to ground him, but considering how he felt once the call was over, it had done him more harm than good.

* * *

The next day, Sam felt ready to apologize to Adam. The only problem was that it was now difficult to find him, and honestly, he didn't want to go running around the campus in hopes of finding his ex-roommates face among thousands of others. Besides, doing that would only increase the chances that he ran into Lucifer as well.

He still hadn't received any actual texts from Lucifer or even seen him anywhere, but the notes continued throughout the week. Every evening, he found his bed made with a new note sitting on top of it. Wednesday's note had started off with " _You're only half of a person right now, Sam. You can't function as half of a person_ _—_ "

Sam only knew what it started with because he forced himself, halfway through, to stop reading and just ball it up and throw it aside. The more he read it, the longer he was going to stay hung on Lucifer, and the worse he was going to feel once he let go of it.

With the third one, he barely glanced at the words before balling up the piece of paper.

With the fourth, he wondered why he didn't just text Lucifer and tell him to stop. Or Hell, to even give him the key to his dorm back. Would he stop, even? He  _had_  had that huge thing about consent. Even after months of them dating, the only thing Lucifer would ever do without asking him first was kissing. And then when it had gotten to the point that Sam did not want to kiss him, Lucifer had respected the fact and did not even ask to kiss him. Perhaps it was that easy, perhaps all he had to do was tell him not to, and Lucifer would stop because he loved him— _no_ , because consent for everything was the one good thing that topped his twisted sense of morals and possession.

By step-by-step logic, that meant that Lucifer was doing this because he knew for sure that Sam wanted it.

He  _thought_  he knew for sure that Sam wanted it.

Sam didn't want it, but he didn't  _not_  want it. He wasn't in denial—he knew that he was still being tricked into loving Lucifer and missing him. The notes brought him a fresh breath of air to see, and he couldn't deny that. It was just that he wanted to  _stop_  being relieved at the sight of proof that Lucifer wasn't giving up by any means.

He couldn't bring himself to try to get Lucifer to stop, and he told himself that doing so would have been worse due to the fact that he would have to acknowledge him in person again.

* * *

Exactly a week after he and Lucifer had been kicked out of Professor Michael's class, the incident that occurred that day caught up with him.

Luckily it wasn't during a class that police arrived to charge him with assault and battery. Though he wasn't sure it would have been much less embarrassing than being cuffed and walked down the long aisle of the men's dormitory, with tons of other guys opening their doors to see why the cops were there. The most he could do to keep it from being too humiliating was to go peacefully: When they arrived at his dorm, Sam just sighed, having known this would probably happen soon, and turned around for them to search him and put handcuffs on him. He didn't argue, and he didn't even try to tell them that he had been provoked.

Hell, maybe it would show them that he wasn't a dangerous or even hot-tempered man (though now that he thought about it, he was), and they might take that into consideration when he had his trial. Having extensive knowledge of the American legal system was pretty useful in this kind of situation.

As Sam passed all the curious faces of men he'd only ever seen, probably never spoken to, he heard several of them whisper things like "I bet it's drugs, he looks pretty tweaked right now" and "I wouldn't be surprised if he killed a guy." Or maybe he didn't, and that was just paranoia making him hear things. He couldn't really be sure of himself anymore.

It wasn't the first time he'd been in the back of a police car, but at least this time he wasn't completely drugged out. Having cocaine pretty fresh in your bloodstream when you were getting caught stealing from a convenience store either made you violent or terrified beyond your worst nightmares, and for Sam, it had been the latter. Heightened senses while stuck in a police car were  _not_  fun.

He wasn't exactly sure why, but he didn't feel any concern for himself or otherwise until he was actually at the station, at which point he was sat down with a cop to wait for further questioning to be approved and a holding cell to possibly be assigned. What was he supposed to do if he had to spend a few nights in jail and then have a court date?—Depending on whether they wanted to classify this as second or first degree (if at all), Sam could get either a substantial fine or several years of imprisonment. And—oh God, how was he supposed to explain this to Dean?

Sam wasn't so much panicking as he was feeling hopeless. He waited in the chair and refused to talk to anyone, knowing that he had full right not to speak—and he was pretty sure that he probably looked like a psychopath with the serial killer expression he was wearing.

Less than an hour later, he was greeted with the sight of the man he'd beaten up, and while Sam waited for him to finish explaining to the police the exact situation, desperation hit him.

"Do you think I can speak with him alone for a minute?" said Sam firmly, looking between the assault victim and the two cops.

They both looked uncertainly to the victim, but he put up his hand and nodded. "It's fine, I know he's handcuffed to the chair. And there's plenty of cops around."

"Alright, you get five minutes," said the beefier of the two cops as they both complied and stood up from their desk to leave.

Sam didn't waste any time. "Listen, you probably think I'm some psycho nutjob like Lucifer, but I'm  _not_. I can honestly say I wasn't myself when I hit you—I was being protective. Of a guy I'm trying to get  _out_  of my life now. I'm sorry, I really am. I never meant for it to—"

"Save it," the other man scoffed, looking at Sam like he was lesser. God, that made him angry. "You really think I'm going to trust you? You could have killed me!"

"But—isn't the whole Christian thing supposed to be about love and forgiveness?

"Not when people nearly kill you," he deadpanned. And really, Sam couldn't argue with that. So he couldn't get out of this through emotions—he'd just have to plead with logic.

"...Alright," he sighed, mostly defeated. "Please, just—I can't go to prison, and I  _can't_  risk it... Is there  _anything_  at all that would make you drop charges? I could pay for your injuries, or let you beat me up to the same extent, or—something. Anything. Please."

He really hated pleading like this, but it was absolutely necessary. Prison was  _not_  an option on his list to fixing up his life—he'd have preferred to just go back to Lucifer right now.

The other man (whose name Sam had still, strangely enough, not yet learned) frowned and sat there thinking in silence for almost a full minute. Finally, he looked to Sam with a completely serious expression and said, "You got a car?"

"Yeah, a Ford Truck," he replied warily, not liking where this was going.

"Great, I'll take that."

* * *

For the third time in two months, life started over for Sam, seemingly at the normal pace. The main difference this time was that now everyone was asking him what he had been arrested for (which he refused to tell anyone), and he had no way to get anywhere without Amelia's help. Which really put a damper on his quality of living because with Lucifer gone, he hadn't stolen anything in over a week, which meant no money on top of no car.

Despite the fact that he'd only just evaded charges that could have put him in prison, Sam seriously considered stealing someone's wallet out of their bag the next time the chance arose. It would have been so easy to do so without getting caught, and really, it was  _their_ fault for being stupid enough to trust their bag next to a stranger for several minutes. He wasn't even going to spend the money on anything illegal or take anything else to go set on fire, so what was the big deal?

_BECAUSE YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE WANTED TO DO THIS WITHOUT LUCIFER!_  he screamed at himself, feeling like he wanted to tear himself apart. Sam still felt Lucifer's influence—his beliefs, his philosophies, his innate need to  _step_  on everyone around him—taking over him, and it _hurt_  with how much it didn't hurt. Every part of him  _wished_  that he could feel how wrong it was to think like him, and yet at the same time every part of him felt like he had always thought this way.

As though his self-control had completely shut down, Sam scooted casually along the bench, laptop still sitting on his legs, and reached over to expertly undo the clasp on the bag, quickly find what must have been the wallet, and re-do the clasp before closing his laptop, standing up, and—

"Just couldn't stop yourself, could you?"

Lucifer came to his side, presumably having been waiting a ways behind him, with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets and his face a mix of amusement and sadness. Sam stared at him in confusion (why had he not shown his face until now?) and frustration ( _why_  was he showing his face now?) and plenty of other things (mainly desire and affection that he wished he could not feel) for several seconds before beginning to just walk away in the other direction. Unsurprisingly, Lucifer followed him.

"That felt good, didn't it?" the man went on, sounding as though things were completely normal between them, like nothing had ever happened. "You shouldn't hold back from what you want for so long. Don't you realize? All these people—they're  _cockroaches_ , Sam. You and me are the gods. You can do whatever you want with them because they don't matter— _you matter, and I matter_. And don't tell me that you don't feel that way, because I know you do."

"It shouldn't have felt good," Sam growled back at first, almost whipping his head around to shoot Lucifer a glare but then refraining from doing so. "You're the only reason I ended up feeling like this. I  _caught_  your crazy."

Lucifer seemed to ignore him. "I heard you got arrested," was all he said in the next minute.

"Yeah," he spat, finally stopping in his tracks and turning to look at Lucifer in bitter, spiteful anger. "Even though  _you_  should have been the one getting arrested."

"You're the one who punched him, Sam." Lucifer was frustratingly calm about it until he continued—"But if I had been  _with_  you when the police came, you know I would have fought back for you and gotten myself arrested, too. Do you honestly think I would just leave you to go to prison for three years—?"

"Do  _you_  honestly think that this is the issue, here? It was  _your_  fault that I assaulted that guy in the first place—I had to give up my  _truck_  to keep him from pressing charges! How can you do something like that to me and think it's forgivable?"

"Because  _you_  do, Sam," Lucifer said immediately, stepping dangerously close to him.  _Dangerously_  meaning that it put him in such easy proximity for Sam to just reach out and touch him, which he wanted so badly to do and yet could  _not_ , for the sake of all that was sane and healthy. He wanted to give in and pull Lucifer in and kiss him, just  _feel_  him after a week of not even speaking to him other than one-sided notes. "I know you better than anyone, and I  _know_  that you don't really care about whatever moral crap you're trying to force yourself into. Look at you—I tried to do what you said, just to see if it really would make you happy, but me being away from you is  _not_  doing that, Sam. You haven't seen me in a week and yet you  _still_  came back to this! Don't you realize what that means?—This is  _part of you_. Maybe it started with Ruby, maybe before, I don't know, but you will  _always_  come back to this."

Sam didn't even have it in him to argue. He didn't want to scream back at him that he was wrong, not while they were in the busy courtyard in front of the main building. The only strength he felt like he had was just enough to force himself to step away from rather than  _towards_ Lucifer, and to mutter, "Jus' leave me alone."

Later, when he pocketed the stolen money, Sam felt himself agreeing and wishing that he didn't: Ruby had been poison, and now that he'd gotten a taste of it, he was always going to be attracted to it. The poison. The dark. And what could have been more poisonous than Lucifer?


	12. All you need is (Lucifer's) love

After the first time he'd seen Lucifer since quitting him (that's what he was referring to it as now), Sam barely slept. He realized that he had been waiting for this point of his withdrawal when he lay down in bed that night and never fell asleep.

It wasn't like normal insomnia; not now, at least. A lack of ability to sleep like that was common for drug-addicts, especially ones who injected and snorted the hardcore stimulants that Sam had done. A few years ago when he had gotten a shot of heroin at least four times a week, he'd stayed awake for several days at a time and then, sometimes, just collapsed. Dean had thought, at first, that it was due to stress. Lucky that his brother had never been all that smart (or maybe he had just been too trusting of him).

But during rehabilitation? Insomnia wasn't quite as common in people going through withdrawal. Sam had assumed it was when he had first spent an entire night awake in his room at rehab—but then it had turned out that for most, it was night terrors and other weird sleeping behavior, like sleep-walking. Sam just did not sleep. And what made it stranger was that he wouldn't feel tired afterwards; he'd never collapsed even after four full days of no sleep whatsoever. His doctors had needed to give him medication to force him to sleep because his lack of sleep would be apparent in his bloodshot eyes and the way he walked.

The best explanation any of them had been able to give was that Sam's mind had been giving itself relapses without even having the actual drug—as though, without any drugs in his system, his brain was feeling such a loss that it  _created_  hormones to mimic some of the effects of heroin and cocaine and the like.

And that on its own was pretty much proof that Sam was literally programmed to do harmful things to himself—rather than having the instinct to ultimately stay alive, his mind turned it backwards and gave him the instinct run directly _into_  traffic, to swim  _away_  from the surface... to take what he knew was poison.

Sam sometimes wondered if his mind would actually allow him to drown himself without any restraints. But then he stopped because he really, really did  _not_  want to go that route. He was trying to get his life back on track, not drive straight off of it.

And so far his life was just withdrawal again. For several days at a time, Sam remained entirely awake. He didn't feel the slightest inclination towards sleep until the very end of that span of days, and when he did finally sleep, he dreamt about Lucifer.

That was one of the things that made him simultaneously glad that he barely ever slept now and wishing that he slept more. The former was a sentiment of the part of him he was trying so desperately to be, and the latter was the core of him that he could not, for the life of him, stop being. All he could do was hide it.

Dreaming of Lucifer didn't exactly help him, but Sam couldn't help but dream about him in the nights (and sometimes, just for a few hours in the middle of the day) that he couldn't help but sleep. Some of them were simply he and Lucifer acting as they would have before Sam quit him, sitting around in the dorm with Lucifer singing and Sam listening to him while studying. And then the rest were fairly explicit in all the ways you can imagine. Both of them left him in a cold sweat when he woke up and needing a longer-than-usual cold shower.

The mornings (and times otherwise) that he woke up with an erection were the worst because Sam refused to let himself take care of it. He refused to touch himself at all because he  _knew_  his mind would automatically go to Lucifer, and this was one of those situations where yes, just one time getting off  _would_ hurt. Anything that kept him dependent on Lucifer would hurt. For all he knew, the moment he touched himself with thoughts of the very thing he was trying to quit, he would lose control of the situation and go running straight back to the source of the problem.

The obvious solution was to wait for the erection to go away or to attempt to  _make_  it go away by thinking about extremely un-arousing things. And Sam did manage to do that a few times, but most of the time when his mind wandered to Lucifer even without him touching himself, his fantasies got the better of him.

Soon after waking up, his anti-boner thoughts would shoot to Lucifer and everything would go downhill—he would see, very clearly in his mind, Lucifer above him, touching him, kissing him... Oh  _God_ , were they realistic. Sam wouldn't be able to stop the fantasies from coming on from the position he was in—perhaps if he had jumped up to get in the shower a bit sooner. But he would stay in bed too long and be trapped, and for how terribly clear the fantasies were, they might as well have been real. It might have been the permanent effects of all those drugs years ago (or perhaps it was just  _him_ ), but he would legitimately  _feel_  all the invisible touches, all the imaginary strokes.

And he would end up with semen in his underwear and his hands still clutching the bedsheets like he would have died without them, and the scent and feel of Lucifer would still be on him despite him never having been there in the first place. Really, if it weren't for the fact that the Lucifer he saw was always gone as quickly as he came, Sam might have believed that it was always real.

Well, that and the fact that the Lucifer he saw never explicitly asked for permission.

Even aside from that, though, Sam wasn't always sure that what he was seeing and hearing was real anymore. He sometimes saw Lucifer in the middle of the day on a weekend when he was in his dorm and there was absolutely no possibility of him being in there. Just for a moment, Lucifer would be in the corner of his eye—while studying, in a class, showering... occasionally even in the mirror. It was always just moments at a time. It was more often during the night, when he was alone and awake in his dorm and there was no one and nothing of substance there to reassure him that he wasn't entirely separate from reality. Sam decided that it must have been a result of his lack of sleep. Insomnia-induced hallucinations, of course; it made plenty of sense.

Strangely enough, the fake Lucifers that he saw never looked malicious or possessive. For the moments that Sam was able to discern their faces, they either looked vaguely charming or sad. He tried not to think about them when he wasn't seeing them.

And it wasn't only the occasional glimpse of a Lucifer that wasn't there; a few times, Sam had been in the middle of doing homework when he suddenly realized that he actually hadn't typed anything at all—he'd been sitting and staring at the blank Word document on his laptop for an hour. All but one of those times (the first), he simply decided afterwards to just not do the assignment because it wasn't worth trying to re-do all the work his head had already done but decided not to carry out physically.

He sometimes heard things that weren't real, too, but that wasn't exactly new.

* * *

Beginning of week four (relatively) without Lucifer. Progress: Still alive. The problem was that everyone else seemed to be aware that that was progress for him, as well.

It was impossible for anyone who paid attention to him not to notice. With all that withdrawal from Lucifer had done to him physically, Sam was left with some pretty obvious signs to some people. Luckily enough, those people were still mostly just Amelia, Lily, and Ava (whom had found out later than everyone else due to her temporarily breaking from the friend group)—and then Andy and Max, whom he hadn't seen much since the first week, but they'd apparently still been kept up with everything. It was sort of a topic of gossip in the college, anyway.

"You look like you haven't slept in three days," Amelia had said soon after Sam's insomnia had started back up again. It was half-jokingly, half-serious—and Sam replied full-serious:

"Four, actually."

"What—are you serious?" she snapped back concernedly, clearly searching his face for legitimate signs of sleep deprivation, now. Sam tried to remember if she was taking any sort of medical course—but for that moment, he could not remember. "Like, you've legitimately gone ninety-six whole hours without sleeping at all?"

"Probably a bit less, technically," he answered dully, shifting the notes in front of him and pretending to care about them. Pretending to care about anything felt like a chore, now. He barely paid any mind to how worried Amelia seemed about both his health and his apathy.

There were a few seconds in which she seemed unable to say anything to him. She was probably debating whether or not it was a good idea to tell him right off the bat that he needed to either go sleep or go to the hospital. Sam would have disagreed to both of those.

"So... are you even tired right now?" was what she seemed to settle with.

After a moment of thought, Sam merely shook his head and shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Nah. Wide awake, actually." He knew he probably looked like he was lying, what with the bags under his eyes and the sallow look of his skin, but he didn't care. He  _did_  feel completely awake, in fact. Or his body did. His soul, on the other hand, felt trampled.

It wasn't until after the European History lesson had ended that Amelia said anything about it again, but Sam noticed her worrying looks all the way through, and he was pretty sure he knew exactly what she was worrying about. He also knew that she wasn't going to say anything because for some reason, people didn't like bringing up the subject of one's mental health when it also regarded another person.

"It's probably stress causing the insomnia," she suggested as an explanation, and Sam saw it as an easy way out despite the fact that he knew she knew she was wrong. What she was really thinking was evident behind her eyes—Hell, Sam didn't even have to look at her, he just _knew_ — _Not having Lucifer around is eating you up worse than it did when he was here, but neither of us can do anything about it._

"Eating him up" was an understatement that Sam found theoretically offensive. It didn't do any justice to all that he was feeling and no longer feeling—though he was by no means going to admit it, and neither was anyone else.

He knew they could all tell that he was going insane. Amelia's and Lily's looks, both to him and to each other, became more worried and scared every day. Ava seemed frustrated more than anything, but that was just her.

Sam suspected that he must have gone long periods of time just staring at one thing around them, or reacting to a noise that had never been there or something he'd thought they'd said even though they hadn't. The look of it was on their faces clear as day—and he wasn't sure, at first, why that expression was so recognizable, but then he realized that he had seen it on the faces of his doctors in rehab. It was the "he just did something odd but we're going to ignore it to make him feel relatively sane" look.

The first time any of them said anything was during week four, when Lily told him that he was looking pretty distant.

"I feel like I'm not even in my own body right now," he told them without thinking, and without even realizing that he'd said that until much later that day. And then he let out a barking laugh which, in retrospect, seemed to have scared them.

"Maybe because you really need some fucking sleep," Ava deadpanned, frowning at him. Sam looked up at her. "Or because you're secretly on drugs, I don't know.  _Are_  you secretly on drugs?"

Normally that might have earned her an elbow in her arm and a hush from Amelia, but she and Lily just stared at him with the same intensity that Ava was.

For a moment Sam was terrified that they had all somehow found out about all the drug shit with Ruby—until he realized that not only did that assumption not really make sense, but it was also impossible. It was easy to blame that thought-process fuck-up on the lack of sleep.

"What, do you think I'm stupid?" he finally said, sounding offended, after who knew how long. For all he knew, really, none of this could be happening and he might have actually been in an empty cafeteria in the middle of the night. "No. I'm not doing drugs. What would I be on drugs for?"

"Well, because of Lucifer, for one," Lily answered, always the one to be too bold for her own good, it seemed. She frowned like a scolding mother. "You've been acting clinically depressed ever since you broke up with him. And no mentally healthy person just sits at their seat and stares at their lunch with a glassy look in their eyes for ten minutes, so if you  _are_  on drugs, which honestly would not surprise me at this point, tell us so we can  _help_  you!"

"Fuck you, I'm doing fine without him," said Sam bitterly—though he might have slurred it, he wasn't sure. "That was the whole point of this, wasn't it? To make me better after he ruined me?"

He might have said something else to them before just leaving the table and going back to his dorm, he wasn't sure. The only thing he could feel sure of was that he'd immediately collapsed on his bed and slept long enough to miss the rest of that day's lessons and then half of the next day's. When he woke up, he had a blanket pulled over him and a note laid carefully next to him on the bed—which he, at once, crumpled up and threw to the other side of the room without thinking.

* * *

Sam's friends cared too much about him. He didn't deserve them. That wasn't a thought of his own; it was just a fact. Sure, it wasn't his fault that he needed so much help with just interacting normally these days, and it hadn't been his fault that he had never even genuinely been able to like them as fully as he'd wanted to, but he never helped them in return. He just never even tried. And that was because he barely had any genuine care for them. Which was, once again, technically not his fault, but that didn't mean anything on a moral level. Ends justified the means, right?

At least partially, seemingly, in order to help  _him_ , Amelia planned another outing to the Roadhouse for all of them that weekend. A little more than a month ago, Sam would have lied and made up some excuse not to go. He supposed this was an improvement.

This time, though, he spent a significant amount of time at the bar. Ash was on duty tonight, so he had no problem with Sam drinking so much, and he didn't ask any questions. He'd always been fairly cool like that. It always took forever for Sam to get genuinely drunk, anyway, so it would have taken much more than he was planning to drink in order to get him wasted. He just needed to feel like he had nothing to worry about right now—Sam was generally a silly drunk, so just the right amount of alcohol could have just made thoughts of Lucifer go away entirely.

Amelia and the others were spaced around the restaurant, some at the table, some playing pool, and then Andy was at the bar with him for a short time until he decided to go flirt with some girl on the other side of the room. He gave Sam a hearty apology and pat him on the back before leaving him, but there was really no need; Sam actually wanted to be alone with his drink for a while.

Soon after Andy had gone to go flirt, he heard the  _clunk_  of glass against wood and looked up to see that Ash was handing him another beer, apparently seeing that he was finished with the one he'd been drinking.

"I didn't ask you for a—"

"No problem, man," Ash cut him off with a wave of his hand and jerked his thumb to his left. "That guy over there bought it for you." Unaware of what had just happened, Ash merely smirked and walked off.

Lucifer was sitting at the other end of the bar not unlike how Sam had caught him the first time they had come here, leaning forward with his arms on the bar and looking wistfully over at him. Sam groaned to himself and glared, first at Lucifer and then at the bottle in front of him. He was adamant about not drinking it at first, if only to spite him, but after a minute of staring at the beer, he figured that it was a free beer regardless and he really needed it.

It seemed that he had taken Sam finally accepting the beer as an invitation to come over, for in the next couple seconds, the seat next to him was no longer empty.

"Out looking for a date?" said Lucifer casually, as though they were perfectly good friends, and as though that question didn't tear them both up on the inside.

Sam briefly considered just telling him to fuck off, but as poisonous of a person as Lucifer was, he was still a person and an ex-boyfriend so he deserved an answer. Or perhaps Sam really did just want to talk to him, just for a little bit. Already, he was feeling more grounded than three bottles of beer had made him in the past hour, and Sam's self-control had been waning ever since the hallucinations had started.

"No. Just drinking."

Amelia, Lily, and Ava had tried to push him to start dating someone again. Of course, they all assumed that he was only into guys, and he wasn't going to suddenly tell them otherwise. But it didn't even really matter anyway because the moment Amelia had suggested that he try to find another guy in order to fully get over Lucifer (because clearly, as Lily had pointed out, he was  _not_ ), Sam had given her a sharp " _No_."

No, he couldn't. He didn't want a new, fulfilling relationship and he didn't even want some cheap hookup for one night. It wouldn't have felt right, and it by no means would have helped him. Sam wasn't just sexually frustrated. He didn't just need some sort of release. He needed _Lucifer_ , and that was it. Just him.

"Did you follow me here?" Sam couldn't stop myself from asking, first only looking down at the bottle, and then straight ahead, and finally at Lucifer.

There was a pause in which Lucifer was likely picking up on the reference to that other night. Possibly feeling some pain because of it—because Sam was, too.

"'Course not," he said quietly, quirking a smile for half a second.

And Sam was  _this_  close to smiling at that—but no, he would  _not_  listen to the leap that his heart made, he would not allow himself to associate memories of Lucifer with anything positive. He was not going to reenact any more of that night. In fact, he then reminded himself, that night really should have been the first hint that something was wrong with Lucifer. That had been the first time he'd really been witness to particularly worrying behavior, and even then he'd chosen to ignore it. Even his mostly-normal self had ignored his voice of reason for the sake of someone who had literally followed him to a restaurant.

And now, he was choosing to ignore the actions of his past self and what those actions meant.

"What are you doing here?" Sam finally thought to ask, frowning deeply at him. It was more out of curiosity than anger or bitterness or frustration: Lucifer hadn't been trying to convince him to come back to him at all. He'd barely said anything to him so far tonight.

Lucifer swallowed a gulp of his own beer and frowned back at him, turning on his stool a bit to face Sam more. "I'm checking up on you—I'm _worried_  about you, Sam," he told him in earnest, gesturing out to him—

"Don't touch me," he spat, pulling himself further from Lucifer's reach and trying to pull his  _mind_  off the ground. Maybe if he could just stop his instinctual association of Lucifer with being grounded, _maybe_  if he could just never feel grounded, that would be better than letting the other man have any control, intentional or not, over him at all.

"We both know that I'm not going to touch you unless you ask me to," said Lucifer stiffly, almost offended. "Believe it or not, I respect you, and I want what's best for you—"

"Then  _why_  won't you leave me alone?" Sam sounded more distressed than he had heard himself in a long time; it was probably partially due to the beer. He slammed the bottle down on the bar, but not quite loudly enough to attract the attention of other people for more than a moment, and it was with the intention of intimidating Lucifer, just a little bit. Maybe. Come to think of it, nothing ever seemed to intimidate the guy, not even Sam and his sheer size.

"Because  _I_  am what's best for you," he said as though it were obvious, which it really was. "And you're being stubborn like a child—"

"It's called determination," Sam told him, trying his best not to slur his words over the beer. "You don't go straight back to drugs just because withdrawal's tough on you. I went through rehab once, and I can do it again. I can  _beat_  you, Lucifer."

For a moment, as Lucifer just stared at him in silence, he looked like the saddest, most broken man in the world. Sam wouldn't have been surprised if he had broken down crying right then—but he also didn't know what he would have done. If he would have been able to sit there and watch, if he could have just left... or if he would have said  _fuck all_  to everything and stepped off the stool to console the broken man in front of him with warm arms wrapping tightly around him and kisses and soft words of apology.

But Lucifer, thank God, did not do that. His emotional stability seemed to have returned somewhat when he inhaled deeply, sorted his expression out, and said in a clipped tone, "Maybe you can. But—but if you do... then what's  _inside_  of you is going to destroy you instead while you just ignore it. At least  _I'm_  honest with myself, Sam."

" _You're_  here?" came a voice from the side, and then Lily was stomping her way from her table with Amelia and Rose and heading straight for Lucifer like it was nobody's business. "Oh my God, just—I think you've fucking done enough. Sam broke up with you nearly a month ago, it's over, now grow up and get the fuck over it."

"Lily, don't," Sam said through gritted teeth, hating all the attention that was suddenly on him and Lucifer. He half-expected her to show a surprising amount of strength and physically throw Lucifer out of the Roadhouse, but he also immediately foresaw himself stopping her from doing that at the thought.

"You're really getting  _these_  people to fight your battles for you now, Sam?" said Lucifer with a sip of his beer and no more than casual disappointment in his voice. But then he turned his stool around, and his entire expression, including his body language, changed as he switched his attention to Lily. "Don't get involved in things that don't concern you," he told her, head cocked to the side and hands condescendingly propping him up on his knees, and Sam could  _hear_  the acid in his voice. "You can't hope to understand Sam and I—this is his life, not yours. You were never part of it. So you are  _no one_  to tell me that it's over."

If only for the sake of a dramatic exit (or perhaps to avoid getting punched in the face, since that was what Lily looked like she was about to do), it was then that Lucifer slipped off the stool and began walking towards the exit. He didn't even take his half-finished beer with him or turn around to say goodbye to Sam.

Everyone was still staring in the few following seconds after the door swung shut, but it was only Sam, Lily, and a few others who seemed to notice Lucifer remain just outside the exit, drawing a large heart into the frost on the window facing the bar. Weirdly enough, it was a traditional heart shape rather than a realistic one this time.

Lily gave him a look that meant she was about to say something right as it hit Sam that Lucifer looked like he was just as miserable without Sam as Sam was without him. And then whatever she was about to say had to wait because in the next second, Sam had knocked over Lucifer's unfinished beer so that it fell to the floor and sent glass shattering around his feet, and he was storming out the back, employees-only exit with half his face in one hand and his soul screaming.

* * *

You would think that in any one of the times that Lucifer decided to visit him, Sam would have told him to stop with the notes. But he didn't. Every day he still found one on his bed, and every day he balled it up and tossed it away without looking at it for more than a split second. They were piling up on the empty side of his dorm, and he never bothered to throw them all away for good. He didn't think he could bring himself to if he tried.

It was something small to cling to. Sam didn't view it as dangerous because he could argue that it was more the routine aspect of it than the fact that they were from Lucifer—finding a note on his bed, crumpling it up, tossing it to the other side of the room. That little ritual provided a means for Sam to know for sure that what he was doing was real. It reminded him of where he was and  _who_  he was, and at this point, that was something he needed daily.

And his friends— _those people_ —couldn't do that for him anymore. Amelia and Ava and Lily were blurred too far into the background at this point. Even (attempted) intelligent conversations with them no longer held anything for him. Sam didn't go out to dinner with them anymore, he only talked to Amelia in European History when she spoke first, and he left lunch early more often than not.

The only things that kept him going were the classes he attended and the notes that he found and did not read. Breaking that routine seemed like it would have been the end of all things—he just had to keep doing this. Every day, Sam told himself that this would work out for him in the long run. He just kept telling himself that this  _was_  doing him more good than harm even if it didn't seem that way right now, and on some level, he did believe that.

Barely a week into March, though, Sam allowed his routine to falter and made the impulse decision to simply not get dinner at all that evening. He realized that he would have ended up leaving at least halfway through, anyway, and finally figured that being around the girls wasn't helping. There was no proof that their presence harmed him in any way, but he just couldn't care anymore. They likely wouldn't have been surprised at his sudden disappearance, for the most part, from their lives; perhaps they wouldn't even have cared. Sam didn't think they had any room for a drifter like him in their lives.

Anticipating a meal of cheap, generic noodles instead of semi-decent cafeteria food, Sam headed straight for his dorm after his last lesson of the day. And then stood stock-still in the doorway.

" _What are you doing here?"_  would have been a stupid question, so Sam didn't insult his own intelligence by letting himself say it. There was no surprise, not even at the lack of anger or frustration in his stomach—just a desire to understand. So instead he stepped forward, let the door fall shut behind him, and said as firmly as he could bring himself to, "You obviously know that I don't read them. So why do you keep writing them?"

Lucifer was sitting on the edge of the bed, tearing a piece of paper out of a notebook in his hand, and his position briefly locked by the unexpected sight of Sam. And the sight of him on his bed after all this time—it  _tore_  Sam. Not just because of how painful it was to keep from moving forward and pressing Lucifer deep into the mattress, but because Lucifer just seemed so casual. Like he belonged there, in Sam's living space. It still felt like he belonged.

"Because you need them," said Lucifer after a few seconds, returning his gaze to the notebook and finishing the job of tearing the sheet with today's note out. He then stood up and set the paper down in the middle of Sam's bed like he wasn't standing right there. "And because I need them."

_You can't just go into other people's dorms, Lucifer. You don't live here anymore_ —was something that he could have said. But it didn't feel right.

_I don't care what you need._

_I don't need them._

_Don't ever come back in here again._

They all felt like lies, and for some reason, Sam could not for the life of him bring himself to lie to Lucifer right now.

"What makes you think that I need them?" he asked, and it was impossible for him to tell whether he was asking genuinely or in anger.

That seemed to make Lucifer just as angry as Sam had gotten all the times he'd tried to explain how he was ruining him. He furrowed his brow and stepped forward accusingly. "Just by  _looking_  at you, Sam! You're not eating as much as you should, and you're barely sleeping, and I know this is all my fault, so I'm just trying to fix it! That's not healthy, Sam. You haven't slept in over three days. I can't have you dropping dea—"

"Hold on,  _how_  do you know I haven't slept in three days?" Now Sam was stepping forward, momentarily worried that Lucifer was actually _stalking_  him until—

"The past three days I've come in here, the bed has been made entirely like I had it the day before. So you haven't gotten in it. I...  _please_ stop doing this to yourself, Sam," Lucifer added in a near-whisper, sounding hopelessly desperate. "Let me fix you."

It would have been so easy, right at that moment more than ever. Sam could have just taken exactly what he wanted, just like he always could with Lucifer—and the difference was that now, he felt ashamed of taking it, and he had been trying to convince himself for weeks that it was possible to push himself above the connection he had with Lucifer and the  _need_  for him.

Lucifer  _could_  fix him, but not in the way that he wanted. Not in the way that he  _wanted_  to want.

"You can't," Sam finally told him, shaking his head and choking on his own breath. He had to pause to get his facial expression under control, and even when he spoke again, it was still shaky. "I... I  _know_  I've always been like this, the way that you keep telling me—you don't need to keep trying to convince me how much I'm like you. I  _know_. I've known since I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure even Dean always knew there was something off... but I never  _wanted_  to be this way!" When Sam shouted, his jaw felt locked, and his vision started to blur as he sharply gestured to himself and felt a rush. Of sadness, of hopelessness, even, on some level, of satisfaction. Of everything. It was intense enough to make him stumble like he was about to fall, and Lucifer looked ready to catch him.

"I was programmed one way and raised to be something entirely different," Sam went on, the words seeming to force their way out of him. "...And I  _knew_ , from the very beginning, that I wasn't normal, but that's all I ever fucking wanted, Lucifer! I wanted to  _feel_  things the same way other people felt things, and I could never even have that—and then I realized that I only ever wanted that so my own dad would stop looking at me like I was a monster. So no, you  _can't_  fix me, because no matter what you do... no matter how—" He let out an involuntary sob and struggled to regain his breath again. "No matter how  _whole_  I feel with you, you can never make me want that again."

Lucifer seemed confused. On some level, Sam could imagine him thinking— _Why would he ever want to be normal? Why would he want to feel the way that other people do? Why does he not believe that he deserves more?_

"You're upset because you lost everything that was left of what you used to wish you could be," Lucifer seemed to finally realize, and all Sam could do was nod, feeling himself begin to fall in a metaphysical sense. "But... that was the wish of a  _child_. And you haven't needed that for a long time, Sam."

Just then, right at the single syllable of his name, Lucifer stepped close enough to place one hand gingerly on Sam's upper arm. And then Sam fell in a physical sense.

It was as though his legs just gave out, like that touch was all they needed to stop working entirely and for Sam to collapse straight into Lucifer's arms. Everything felt hazy and vague, and suddenly all Sam could feel was the floor underneath his knees, and the arms wrapping around him like a thick blanket, and the fabric that he was pressing his face deep into and breathing in like it was the only source of clean oxygen on earth.

"I need you," he said in a gasp of a whisper, but his breath traveled mainly into Lucifer's shirt, so he wasn't sure whether or not he'd heard it and so he said it again. And again. And over and over again until he was so overcome with sudden fatigue that he could barely pull together two consonant sounds. Strong hands rubbed soothing circles on his back and slid smoothly through his hair, and Sam distinctly heard himself being softly hushed with every stroke of his hair.

Sam didn't protest when he felt himself being hauled up off the floor and pushed gently onto the bed. All he could remember by the time he woke up was that a blanket was pulled over him and that he heard a murmur of "I love you" before falling asleep indefinitely.

* * *

When he woke up, Sam was perfectly aware of how he'd broken the night before—or two nights before? He didn't know how long he'd been asleep. He'd practically passed out after three straight days of being awake, so it definitely could have been more than twenty-four hours of sleep.

But there was a surprising lack of Lucifer in the bed with him or even anywhere in the room, which made Sam have to wonder—had any of that even happened? Had Sam collapsed into no one, only  _thinking_ that Lucifer was there? That thought terrified him. If Lucifer hadn't actually been in here, then who was to say that he actually cared about Sam in the way that he claimed to? How could Sam count that night's mental breakdown in Lucifer's arms a turning point or a decision if it hadn't even been real?

His heart seemed to stop completely as he fumbled with the blankets and noticed a note lying next to him on the bed, folded a bit in between a part of the blanket that he'd kicked off. It wasn't necessarily proof that all of that had actually happened, but it was pretty goddamn close.

Instead of tossing it to the side, Sam sat up fully on his bed and grabbed the paper to bring to his face so he could see what it said.

"' _I'm afraid that you might kill yourself,_ '" he read aloud, not really surprised by the hoarseness of his voice. "' _Please stop this._ '"

And with that, his curiosity finally got the better of him—but it didn't matter, he was already broken anyway—and Sam was throwing off the rest of the blankets and stumbling to the other side of the room. He grabbed the first balled-up paper he could reach and fell to his knees as he uncrumpled it quickly but carefully.

_We're two halves made whole, I thought you realized it when you met me like I realized it when I met you. The sooner you realize it again, the sooner we can get back to normal._

Once he finished reading it, he set it aside and picked up another one.

_What am I supposed to do without you, Sam?_

And another.

_I considered talking to you today. But you were pretty deep into whatever you were reading and you're too beautiful to disturb when you're like that._

He went through all of them, letting the flattened-out notes pile up next to him once he was finished reading each one. Some were targeted towards him, telling him that he needed to stop doing this to himself, to just take what he wanted instead of pushing it away.

_You're sick,_ one of them said.  _All I want to do is make you better._

Some weren't even about their relationship in particular, just something like ' _Crowley kicked me out of the dorm for tonight because I threw another one of his toys out the window. I guess I'll just sleep in the hallway._ '

Some were actual apologies, and those were what broke Sam into even smaller pieces—

_I never meant to make you hurt, Sam._

_I wish I hadn't been such a fucking idiot to bring you to my Bible Studies class. I wish I had stopped you from hitting that guy. I wish I wasn't such a fag that he felt the need to tell me so loudly._

_I wish we had made love looking each other in the face more during the end._

_I'm sorry if I really caused you any pain, Sam. I am so sorry._

And then some were just expressing how Lucifer felt about him.

_We were made for each other, literally._

_I love you._

_Please talk to me. I'm miserable._

_I've been having nightmares without you._

_I wanted to live the rest of my life with you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

Sam didn't realize that he was crying until he saw a sudden wet spot on the note he was holding and then heard his own choked sob. Immediately he tried to pull the tears back and to push himself off the floor, and he stumbled once more before standing up completely.

Whether or not all that was actually proof that Lucifer genuinely cared about him, Sam didn't care—he just didn't want to do this anymore. Even if Lucifer was a drug or a tumor or what-have-you, it looked like Sam was meant for that. He still loved him, and he missed him, and he needed him.

Once he'd overcome the dizziness and the sense that he had absolutely no idea what to do, Sam swallowed, straightened himself, and checked his pockets to see if his phone was in any of them. It turned out to have fallen out of his pocket and onto the bed while he'd slept, and it was only once Sam unlocked the phone and looked at the time that he realized exactly how long he had slept: Nearly thirty hours. And all because Lucifer had shown up and fully grounded him.

Sam's thumb hovered over Lucifer's contact for less than a second before he was finally, after over a month of not doing so at all, typing out a message to him:

_Where are you?_

Lucifer returned his message almost immediately.

_In the main building. Just go to the pillars outside the windows, I'll meet you there. L_

Even now, Lucifer seemed to know him better than he knew himself; he knew exactly what Sam wanted, and Sam didn't hesitate to chase after it this time.

* * *

"Why didn't you stay?" Sam asked as Lucifer finally entered his line of sight in the extremely dim light. He had to raise his voice just enough that it reached the twenty feet to the brick pillar, where Lucifer was leaning.

It felt so strangely easy to talk to him normally again—it felt  _comfortable_ , and in a way that it made him realize that he hadn't felt comfortable the moment before. Sam supposed that he hadn't really felt comfortable at all during those weeks alone.

Lucifer frowned at him (though he could barely tell until he was closer because of the darkness) and stepped away from the pillar and onto the grass, closer to Sam. "I didn't think it was fair. To treat a decision you made when you were... high on emotion—as absolute, I mean. I thought I should wait until you woke up for you to—"

"You were afraid that I was going to get angry and kick you out in the morning," Sam said. It wasn't a question—he was finishing Lucifer's thought in the way that Lucifer wasn't going to.

Lucifer looked sad. Sam took that as a confirmation. "I don't think I can take any more rejection from you," he said quietly, though he didn't sound like he expected it now.

"You don't have to," Sam told him immediately and without thinking—he just needed to get that out, to make sure Lucifer knew and that there was absolutely no confusion between them anymore, just—just to set everything straight. "I'm—I don't want to do this anymore... I'm sorry— _God_ , I'm so sorry, I just want—I want—" Sam found himself struggling with his breath and his words, trying to find the right way to say it. "I want you in my life again."

He'd assumed that that would have been the moment that Lucifer rushed forward and grabbed him by the collar and kissed him so hard that he lost his sense of sight, and he was ready for it—but Lucifer remained where he was for the moment being. His chest heaved a little bigger, though, and he stepped forward just slightly.

"What made you realize?" he seemed to be unable not to ask, out of some curiosity, or just some  _need_  to know that Sam was currently in his right mind... It could have easily been either.

The short answer was difficult to find. Sam wished he could just show him everything that he felt and hope that Lucifer could make sense of that mess, but even with how well they knew each other, they couldn't communicate _that_ well. Not yet. So Sam inhaled and thought deeply and flexed his fingers until something occurred to him, and then he was reaching inside his pocket to pull out his wallet and then a folded piece of paper from the inside of it. As he unfolded it, Lucifer already seemed to understand, but Sam held it out to him nevertheless.

_My heart burns for you,_  were the words held between them on that paper, and Lucifer brushed his hand over the pen sketch of the literal burning heart before he smiled. He seemed to expect that as an explanation, and he re-folded the paper as quickly as he could before stepping forward urgently and pulling Sam down, finally, by the collar to kiss him.

Sam vaguely felt the paper be stuffed into his back pocket as he practically fell forward into Lucifer—he caught himself around Lucifer's back, and the man's arms wrapped around him at once to hold him up. It was all he could do to keep himself standing while his lips crashed into Lucifer's—finally,  _finally_ —over and over again. Making up for an entire month lost between them was impossible to do in such short a time, but they tried, and the effort they put forth might have killed them. Sam was trying to kiss him softly and hungrily and passionately and lovingly all at the same time, and it just ended up a mess of their mouths moving together and tangling so deep that he wasn't sure they could ever separate again.

And then they were up against the pillar, though Sam couldn't remember backing Lucifer up into it—he couldn't remember raising both hands to firmly hold either side of Lucifer's face, either. But they were there, and they were kissing the life out of each other and putting their hands everywhere they could reach, and that was all that mattered.

"I—I  _need_  you...," Sam breathed against his mouth,curling his fingers more tightly in Lucifer's hair and pushing his hips forward like a dying man.

Lucifer's breath hitched audibly, and he only allowed one more second to press one last, full kiss to Sam's mouth before squirming his way out from between Sam and the pillar, and then pulled him by the hand towards the nearest entrance to the main building of the college.

It was significantly closer than the dormitories, so it only made sense to head there, but it barely occurred to Sam to wonder  _where_  exactly they were headed while Lucifer was dragging him through the hallways and pulling him around corners. He just followed without thinking of anything but what was to come, waiting for Lucifer to decide when they stopped.

And when they did, it wasn't in front of a closet like they usually might have done, or even an open, empty classroom—it was a locked classroom, and Sam didn't realize which one it was until Lucifer was in the middle of picking the lock.

"Professor Michael's class," said Sam, merely a hint of a question in his tone.

Lucifer just grinned at him, pushed open the freshly unlocked door, and pulled him in. Sam ended up twisting them both around and kicking the door shut, then pulling Lucifer in to start kissing him again and letting him direct him by the hips straight into the desk at the front of the room. As soon as the back of his thighs hit the edge of the wood, Sam let go of Lucifer long enough to twist around again simply to unceremoniously swipe everything—the stack of papers, the books, the pencil cup, the nameplate, and the cross perched on the edge—off of the desk and then push himself up onto it.

The way that Lucifer looked at him as Sam gripped him by the sides and pulled him up on the desk and over him was _perfect_ , even more perfect than how it felt being pressed flat against the desk with Lucifer's chest pinning him down and his knees on either side of Sam's waist. He almost couldn't remember what it had been like to feel this way, and he  _needed_  to feel this again—he needed to feel like he belonged to Lucifer and like Lucifer was his, to be reminded of how there was nothing in the world that was more important than each other.

Sam made it clear enough how much he wanted him with the way that he thrust his hips upward and grabbed every part of Lucifer that he could reach to pull him closer, but that didn't stop him from fisting a handful of Lucifer's hair and using it to pull his ear to his mouth.

"You have no idea how much I need this... I haven't even touched myself in the past month," he admitted in a breathy moan, and Lucifer groaned in response.

"...Not at all?" he asked lowly, his breath going straight into Sam's ear as well.

Sam shook his head. He didn't want to make it seem like he only cared about this thing between them right now so that he could get off, but his sexual frustration—his  _Lucifer_  frustration, really—was at its peak. He was almost afraid, even, that he might come the moment Lucifer touched him.

When Lucifer pulled up to look at him in the face, he looked briefly sad before giving him a promising smile and pressed his lips to Sam's again. It was a smile that Sam recognized, though it seemed heightened, now: It was one that said  _"I am going to make you feel so good, Sam."_

Everything fell back into place. With every kiss, every touch, every thrust, and every slow, sweet moment that Lucifer took to unbutton Sam's shirt and pants, the rift that Sam had forcibly torn between them was seamlessly repaired into something that felt more beautiful (and maybe just a bit more twisted) than it was before.

It wasn't surprising at all that Lucifer still carried lube in his pocket at all times (of course he would have always been anticipating Sam wanting him back), and Sam was glad for it. Although, he would have been ready for Lucifer to take him dry or to scramble to find some kind of lotion in Professor Michael's desk if they had needed. Considering the amount of time it had been since they'd last had sex, though, the feel of cold lube and Lucifer's fingers inside of him  _were_  a slight surprise. Like his first time over again.

Sam wrapped his legs around Lucifer's lower back and pulled him deep inside of him well before Lucifer was ready, and his own cock grew even harder and more erect against his stomach at the sound of Lucifer's sudden gasp and hard breathing. And then he threw his own head back as far as the desk would let him and let out a guttural moan for the pure  _pressure_  inside of him.

They seemed to have forgotten that they were on a desk because the discomfort of the hard surface wasn't getting to them at all—and whether either of them were still fully aware of where they were didn't matter because no matter where they were, Sam wouldn't have cared about letting his moans come out  _loud_. Lucifer cared even less. Low, filthy moans of both of their names were echoing off the distant walls and high ceiling and coming back to them, and Sam made a vague mental note to do something like this again sometime.

Everything about this was just plain risky and dangerous, but that made it all the more thrilling. It wasn't hard and fast and violently passionate between them, though—Lucifer had his arms wrapped around Sam's chest to keep them constantly close in every way, and he thrust into him tortuously slowly and often dipped down to kiss him wherever he could. It was slow and sweet and more like making love than anything, and though Sam hadn't quite expected it, it was perfect.

At some point Sam had no idea what either of them were screaming anymore, but later he would have guessed that there were too many " _I love you_ "s and " _I'm yours_ "es to count. When they had both finally come, Lucifer pulled himself out of Sam and didn't hesitate to lower his feet to the ground and bend down to lick all the ejaculate off of Sam's stomach to clean him up.

Sam was left lying on the desk, breathless, until his mind finally felt clear enough for him to grin and laugh in the pleasure that was still coursing through him, and then sat up and grabbed Lucifer's face with both hands to kiss him soundly. He tasted himself on Lucifer's lips and smirked into them.

After several seconds, they seemed to have silently come to a decision to get completely off the desk and put their clothes back on. And it might have been just a little bit on purpose that they ended up putting on each other's shirts. Sam figured that they were going to just leave as soon as possible so as to make sure not to get caught—but then Lucifer got that  _look_  on his face, and he promptly pulled a lighter out of his pocket.

"What—?

"I want to do this," he insisted, heading to the side of the desk with pull-out drawers and beginning to rifle through them. Within about ten seconds, he stood up holding a bottle of hand sanitizer like it was a prize. "As one last, huge ' _fuck you_ ' to Professor Michael."

As soon as Lucifer had come around to the front of the desk again and started squirting a substantial amount of the hand sanitizer on the floor below the desk, Sam understood what he was doing. He understood the motives behind it, and he understood the mindset that made Lucifer want to do this without as huge of a motive as other people might have needed. Right as Lucifer grabbed one of the surrounding papers to set alight with the pocket-sized flame and subsequently set on top of the hand sanitizer, Sam gathered several papers together, grabbed the bottle of hand sanitizer, and headed up to the tiers of empty chairs and tables.

There was enough of it left in the bottle to spread out in long lines underneath the first four rows of seats. Figuring that should be enough, Sam tossed the nearly-empty bottle of hand sanitizer across the room and pulled his own lighter out of his pocket (he still had it from way back when he and Lucifer had routinely set things on fire for fun), then proceeded to light the edge of a piece of paper that seemed to be part of an essay and set it down on the very highest line of the highly flammable liquid. In this darkness, the bright blue light of the fire that resulted was easy to see, and it was merely seconds before it was enough to set the wooden table above it ablaze, yellow flames licking at the bottom and making the room significantly warmer.

Sam had to hurry to get the rest of the lines of hand sanitizer on fire, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the fire did what he and Lucifer had intended—spread. When he was down on ground-level again, Lucifer was staring at him with an expression full of worship, the flaming teacher's desk providing light behind him. There was time, they decided, for one rough kiss before they broke completely apart but for at the hands and ran the  _fuck_  out of there.

That was, indeed, the perfect  _fuck you_  to Professor Michael.


	13. I've got my Devil riding shotgun

[Devil Riding Shotgun soundtrack ](http://8tracks.com/captainlucifer/devil-riding-shotgun/)

 

 

* * *

With the thirty hours of sleep that Sam already had on him, he didn't fall asleep, not even with the refreshing comfort and warmth of Lucifer's arms around him, until the sky outside was already beginning to brighten up. Sam was content with letting Lucifer tangle his entire body in his and fall asleep like that while he remained hopelessly awake for several more hours, though, as it gave him time to just think and process everything.  _Lucifer was with him again._

_Lucifer is here,_  was his first vague thought as he opened his eyes against the fabric of the pillow some hours later. He inhaled deeply and didn't need to turn his head to the bright, afternoon light to know that they had both slept fairly late. The thought that he was missing a lesson did pass through his mind in the following few seconds, but he brushed it aside. Lessons were no longer a priority as of last night.

Sam shifted the way his arms curled around Lucifer's back so that he could pull back just slightly and look at him. This morning was a morning of  _firsts_  all over again, and this was the first time in over a month that Sam was able to wake up like this. It was the first time in over a month that he didn't feel empty when he woke up—he wasn't drenched in sweat or sporting an erection because of a dream, and he felt as though he had had a perfect night of sleep, and he was  _nowhere near_  hallucinating.

And Lucifer was here.

Lucifer was finally  _here_.

He looked so perfect, his face pressed into the pillow and Sam's arm, his mouth drifting open (and the drool dripping out the corner didn't make it any less perfect), his hair disheveled and the fabric of his shirt clinging to his chest. There was something strange and beautiful about Lucifer when he slept, and Sam hadn't realized exactly how much he had missed that until now.

"I know you're awake," Sam mumbled, holding back a yawn and smiling fondly in his sleepy reverie.

Lucifer didn't attempt to continue feigning unconsciousness, but instead immediately let his lax mouth stretch into a grin as he opened his eyes. "You caught me."

"Hm."

That was all that Sam had to say as he kept staring at Lucifer, studying his face as though that month without him had left him with few memories to cling to. He pressed himself deeper into the bed as he slid his hand from Lucifer's back to his head, ruffling his hair and tracing the shape of his face. Lucifer just stared back, leaning into Sam's touch and not even seeming like he was tempted to speak.

Sam supposed, after some time, that he was doing this to make sure that he was real and that this wasn't some cruel, elaborate dream. He had a feeling that Lucifer knew that, too.

When he felt satisfied that his surroundings were reality, Sam's hand slowed and came to rest on the crook of Lucifer's neck. There were several seconds of peaceful silence before he—well, there was no concrete way to describe exactly what he did. He simply  _felt_ , and then he acted on what he felt without really thinking, and in some space of time he was pressing his lips against Lucifer's so softly that he couldn't even be sure that they were kissing.

"I missed you," Sam whispered as he pulled away.

And he really had. He had wanted so badly to stop missing him, but now, he felt sure that he had known the whole time that that was simply impossible. Nothing on earth could keep him from yearning to be with Lucifer, not even himself.

"Do I need to say 'I told you so?'" Lucifer asked in that controlled, yet charming voice that he'd had the first time Sam has ever spoken to him. All Sam could do now was grin with slight embarrassment at him, and before he could say anything sarcastic or apologetic in return, Lucifer's hands snaked up to clutch at his hair and pull him an inch closer.

The kiss between them, then, was longer and slightly less soft.

"I missed you too," Lucifer breathed into his mouth with urgency. " _So much_." Like he thought Sam needed to be reassured.

Sam opened his eyes back up for the third time that morning and wished that he wouldn't have to leave this bed today.

"You probably already know this," he for some reason felt the need to say, tightening his hold on Lucifer more and pressing his face into the pillow. He took a long pause to breathe and think. "But I was going insane. I swear, it was like... relapse. All over again. And then last night happened, and now I finally feel sane again."

There was something about low voices and bedsheet fabric and the filtered light from an afternoon sun that made everything feel even more sincere. It made Sam want to leave the bed even less.

Silence. Again. But Sam knew that the silence wasn't just  _nothing_ —it was filled with Lucifer's thoughts, which needed plenty of room to expand before he could allow himself to say something profound. And Sam found the sight of Lucifer thinking to be one of the most refreshingly beautiful things.

"Some doctors will tell you that your mental health is more important than your physical health, or vice versa," he told him quietly, furrowing his brow just a hair. "When my mom tried to quit smoking, her doctor told her that it would be unhealthy for her to stop while her stress levels were so high... Then again, she died later, so I guess she's not the best example."

He just looked to Sam for a moment and laughed, and Sam could not help but follow. He hoped Lucifer would never change.

That first half-hour between them held plenty more soft words spoken into the pillows, soft kisses that meant everything between them, and moments of silence that seemed to be placed perfectly. Sam only made a reference to reality when he finally heard the faint buzzing of his phone alarm.

"Do you want to take a shower?" he asked, his tone implying that this was a last resort.

Lucifer's expression for a moment expressed that he felt the same.

"Together?"

Sam grinned and pushed himself up to roll directly over him. "Of course, together."

* * *

"We can't stay, can we?"

Sam was surprised that it had taken this long for that to occur to him. But then he supposed that he had merely been choosing to ignore it ever since he woke up and up until the point that he looked out of the dorm's first-story window and saw the blackened walls on the building across from them. There were still one fire truck and a couple police cars still out there, along with a couple groups of students trying to look past the yellow tape that had been put up.

"Wow, the fire spread that far?" said Lucifer as he ambled over to the window, sounding impressed with himself. The once-grassy area around Professor Michael's classroom's window was now black, and the brick walls were covered in the ash from it. They couldn't see the victimized professor anywhere, but they assumed that he was inside the building, hopelessly kicking around at the burnt wreckage. Any students he was supposed to have today were probably glad that lessons were inevitably canceled.

It was revenge at its simplest, though at the most extreme of forms. A destroyed classroom for being a douchebag in general. But it was also more than revenge—Lucifer had told Sam after a couple weeks of dating him that he wanted to step on everything around him except  _him_. And he stole things from people he didn't like because he saw himself as a god. So this wasn't just some psychopath's revenge on a teacher; it was... a ritual, of some sort, on some level. Not too much unlike how malevolent gods demanded sacrifices from their people. Or just for some huge metaphor because Lucifer was in love with those.

Sam felt a similar satisfaction in destroying things, but he wasn't sure whether it was for the same reason. All he knew was that this was why they fit together so perfectly—Lucifer had an innate need to destroy everything around him, and Sam had an innate need to destroy himself. So he was the one thing that Lucifer wanted to fix, and Lucifer was the only one who could do it.

When he remembered the way that impulse had caught him on a leash and the room had gone up in flames, Sam smiled and observed the ruin with a swell of pride and a lack of the panic that should have been there.

He guessed that there simply wasn't room for panic in him anymore. Where it should have been, he felt resolution and a light acceptance.

"They know it wasn't an accident. They're looking for evidence to pass onto forensics right now," Sam said quietly, still looking out the window and squinting so his eyes didn't catch the almost-blinding sunlight. "If they haven't already, anyway. And that's just if they can't get anything from whatever security tapes were in or around the classroom." He knew the procedures. He knew how easy it was for them to find stuff like this these days.

"They're probably talking to Professor Michael right now, too," Lucifer offered, and Sam couldn't detect any bitterness or panic in his voice, either. "He'll tell them who he suspects, and I would be surprised if we weren't the first people he named."

"So..." Sam did the math in his head. Assuming that the police were getting information from Professor Michael right now, and then adding up all the time it would take for them to get a warrant, then find out exactly where Sam's room was—"We have a minimum of half an hour to leave the campus."

He felt oddly comfortable with that. There was no way for things to go back to normal—his grades were fucked, any remaining relationships that he had here were in tatters that he didn't have the will to piece back together, and he and Lucifer had just wronged too many people to be able to walk among them anymore. And that was aside from the fact that getting arrested for arson could put them both in prison for a while.

Lucifer smiled wryly, in a way that made him seem like he had expected this all along, and said, "Good thing we already have our shoes on."

* * *

Lucifer insisted on grabbing a few books from his and Crowley's dorm to take with him. They couldn't take too much with them both because it would take too long and because it would make them look like they were running away, and with their short time left, they couldn't afford to look suspicious. It was necessary to get down to Lucifer's car as quickly and unsuspectingly as possible.

But being able to have his own copies of  _The Devil in the White City_ ,  _Death on the Nile_ , and  _Lord of the Flies_  with him was clearly worth the risk. It only risked their time, Lucifer told him, since carrying books didn't make you look like you were leaving town for good. At the most, he would look like he was going to the library to turn them in.

They both ended up just dumping out their schoolbags and stuffing in both of their laptops, Lucifer's books, the remaining granola bars from Sam's dorm, and another set of clothes for each of them. Enough that their bags were as full as they could be without looking like there was anything more than just books in them. Lucifer seemed somewhat anxious about leaving so many of his books behind, but Sam didn't mind so much about his own belongings. He had up and left without packing much at all once before, and he could do it again without worry. The fire this time hadn't left any reason for him to stay, just like it hadn't last time.

Sam left the dormitories with a slight, ironic smile as he thought of how pissed Adam would have been at him. Even when he'd finally seen the guy on campus, he had chosen not to approach him or tell him anything because really, he hadn't wanted to share the dorm again. Adam probably knew about Sam having been arrested, but it wasn't extremely likely that he knew about he and Lucifer having split up. And now, there was neither time nor need to tell him that the room was all his again, so Sam just figured it was best to forget him. Just like he would be forgetting everyone else soon enough.

"So this is it," said Sam with a finality as he opened the passenger's door and tossed his bag into the backseat of Lucifer's coupe. In that moment, it didn't feel like they were running on low time. Time meant nothing. So he gripped the car's roof and frowned slightly at the other man over the top of the car rather than insisting that they leave immediately. "The point of no return."

The edge of Lucifer's mouth quirked upwards seemingly on its own as he matched Sam's position on his side of the car. "Every second of our lives has been a point of no return, Sam."

He let out a breathy laugh and for a second felt like he wasn't a soon-to-be fugitive. "You don't really buy into all that destiny crap, do you?"

"On some level, yeah," Lucifer shrugged. "I think some things are meant to be... like us," he added, and both he and Sam smiled. "But we have free will for a reason, and what sets us apart from  _them_  is that we utilize it. Just like we're about to do. Because as of now, we are no longer part of society. We're fugitives."

As though suddenly feeling their seconds counting down before they  _had_  to get the hell outta Dodge, Lucifer swung down to take his seat in the car and swiftly closed the door at the same time. Sam did the same only just out of timing with him, and it was barely a second later that the engine was up and running.

Sam had nothing to say as they pulled out of the parking lot and started on the highway. And after some time, Lucifer seemed to decide that he'd had enough of the silence because he turned the radio on to one of his CDs and flipped straight to the track that had Stairway to Heaven. Sam just stared at him in fond amusement until the instrumental intro ended, then figured  _Oh, what the Hell_  and sang along with him.

* * *

First things first: they had to get rid of their phones. If they were classified as suspects of the arson, the very fact that they had left the school was practically proof that it had been them. Which meant that the law would be after them, and tracking their phone signals would have been too easy. So in some random lake off the side of a country road they went.

There wasn't any real reason for them to have phones, either. The only person Lucifer had to text or call was Sam, and while Sam did have Dean and Cas and Bobby, he didn't want to call them. He didn't want to hear what they had to say about him leaving school and running from the law like this—or worse, have to make up some lie about where he was, if they didn't know. It was somewhat sad, leaving them behind along with everything else, but it was necessary. Even his family was getting blurred into the background of the picture and becoming a part of his past.

_Lucifer's my family now,_  thought Sam as though inhaling the words, deciding that he was okay with that. He was perfectly okay with that.

"D'you think maybe we should get pay-as-you-go phones... just in case?" Sam asked him as they walked back to the car.

"In case of what?" Lucifer frowned, both at him and because of the sun.

"I dunno—if we get separated or something."

"We won't," Lucifer said simply. "We'll never be far enough away from each other to need a phone."

"Well... what if one of us gets kidnapped?"

Sam held a serious expression until Lucifer started laughing, and once again, he couldn't help but join in. They were already inside the car by the time Lucifer said, "I don't think they would only take one of us."

The next thing to go was the license plate: It was surprisingly not very difficult to steal and replace a license plate from another car. Assuming that they were, indeed, wanted, the safest thing to do was to continue replacing it on a very non-schedule schedule.

And soon after they did that, Sam realized one last precaution—

"We need to empty our debit cards before we get too far away from Lawrence, and then only ever pay for things in cash," he told Lucifer in the car, snapping his head over as the thought hit him. "They can track us through those, too, and if we do it sooner, they can't get any leads on where we are."

Lucifer seemed fairly impressed with Sam's quick thinking and knowledge of how to live life as a fugitive—impressed enough to pull him into a rough kiss and nearly swerve into oncoming traffic because of the distraction.

* * *

By day, they drove, and by night, they mostly slept in the car. Motels would have been preferable (in some places, at least), but they figured it best to keep from spending too much money unnecessarily. Despite the fact that there was so little room to sleep in the backseat and it was virtually impossible to have sex back there.

Neither of them had very much money when they set out, so it didn't even really need to be discussed that they would be stealing wallets off of plenty of people (drunk people at bars were the easiest targets) and dine-and-ditching most of the times that they ate. The life of stealing to get what you wanted and sometimes just for the hell of it was all too natural to them—Sam felt like he belonged there. That is to say, that he belonged nowhere. He was meant to be a drifter, to never stay in the same place too long. And so was Lucifer.

The longer they were away from Kansas, the safer it was for Sam and Lucifer to stop and stay in one town for a full day and not to just keep going in their attempt to escape. And the more money they collected from their various thefts, the more often they indulged in nights at motels. It was more for a comfortable place to get intimate than a safer place to sleep, really. In the alley behind gas stations and on park benches at night were risky and in the nitty-gritty just the way Sam liked, but being able to fall asleep naked in each other's arms and wake up together the next morning was just something he could never get enough of.

For a couple weeks (or at least he thought it might have been that long; Sam wasn't keeping much track of time and days anymore), every moment that wasn't spent eating, sleeping, or driving was put towards tricking drunk strangers out of their money. But that inevitably became  _not enough_  for either of them, and they got deeper and deeper into the life of a true criminal. As if daily theft wasn't enough to classify them as one.

They were driving through a quiet, rural road in Texas when they finally crossed that line. Lucifer slowed the car to a stop and Sam barely realized it because the decrease in speed didn't get through the book he had in his hands. He put it down when the car came to a full stop and turned to his boyfriend with a frown. "Why did you—?"

"I want to steal that street sign, Sam," Lucifer told him with a calm, strange determination in his eyes as he unlocked the doors and opened his own.

Sam had to get out of the car to see it from where they were parked. Once he saw that it was a Bear Crossing sign, he locked gazes with a grinning Lucifer and nodded. "Alright. Let's take it."

It was difficult to get the bolts out with only a pocketknife rather than an actual screwdriver, and Lucifer told him that they needed to buy one at the next supermarket they passed. At the notion that this was going to become another thing between them, Sam smiled down at the yellow sign before tossing it into the trunk.

There was something oddly (and probably a bit childishly) satisfying about taking street signs. Lucifer's and Sam's reasoning, though they never actually said it out loud, was that they took signs that were meant to provide for people's safety—but never the basic safety ones like stop signs. Those weren't interesting enough. It left them giggling like teenage girls nearly every time they drove away with a new sign in the trunk.

"I've decided to stop referring to you as my boyfriend," Sam told Lucifer one evening, having been thinking for about an hour after their last street sign-theft. "In my head, at least."

"Hm?" Lucifer glanced over, seeming more curious than confused. Or perhaps just too focused on the road to react properly.

"It's just not strong enough of a word-we're on the run from the law, aren't we?" Sam reasoned. "You're... my lover. My—"

"Your soulmate."

"My devil."

"That too."

Lucifer smirked, and Sam gave him one to match as he leaned further back in his seat and let his hand drift over to Lucifer's thigh for a moment's squeeze.

Except he could hear the man's hitched breath the moment that he did, and so Sam curled his fingers in tighter around Lucifer's thigh rather than letting go. A curious frown grazed his face before he could hear the word  _"Revenge"_  deliciously ringing out in his head, and he made sure to let his hand slide up and down the thigh it was on as sensually as possible.

Lucifer glanced at him again the same time that his pants tightened—and the look in his eyes held arousal with a subtle message of  _Oh, you bastard._

Sam supposed that paying attention to the road was rather difficult when there was a hand crawling its way into your pants to stroke your half-hard cock, but he felt confident, for some reason, that they would not die. He also felt confident that this method of distraction was entirely worth it. After a couple minutes of listening to Lucifer trying to control his breathing and letting out the occasional whispered " _Sam_ ," he made an impulse decision and tugged Lucifer's pants down far enough to get his cock completely out.

As always, the look on Lucifer's face was better than anything as Sam pulled off his seat belt and bent down all the way to stick his head in Lucifer's lap and give him the riskiest blowjob of his life. Lucifer wasn't trying in the least to hide his moans or facial expressions (which anyone in nearby cars could see through the window), but he was clearly struggling to force himself to look at the road what with the several times that Sam felt a jerk in the car and heard a loud honk from the outside.

It was a miracle that they were still alive by the time that Sam swallowed, popped his lips off Lucifer's cock, and sat up again. But if they had died in a crash from that horrible (and amazing) decision, it would have been a pretty great way to go.

The next time they stopped at a gas station, Lucifer immediately leaned over to kiss the still-smug look off of Sam's face, and he had a feeling he knew what was coming—

"You're driving for the rest of the night," was all he said afterwards, not touching Sam's partial erection at all. With a sudden bitchface and neglected arousal, Sam switched seats with him and supposed that he couldn't be surprised.

* * *

Sam became the designated driver there on out—as Lucifer said, he was a much better and more focused driver.

"I think you've just gotten lazy," Sam muttered with a soft laugh the next morning when Lucifer voluntarily got into the passenger's seat.

Lucifer smiled back at him and said, "I just think you belong in the driver's seat. You're more at home there."

"Is it because I  _drive_  you wild?" was the first thing that Sam thought to say, and he barely lasted two seconds before he was laughing and apologizing. "Oh God—that was so bad, I'm sorry."

"Puns are the lowest form of wit, Sam," said Lucifer, though he was still smiling.

"But the highest form of literature," Sam replied, looking smug.

As he pulled out of the motel parking lot, he decided that it was pretty likely that one of the (possibly main) reasons Lucifer wanted him to drive was so he could do the same thing that Sam had done to him the night before.

He turned out to be right.

* * *

A little more than a month on the road found Sam sitting cross-legged on a motel bed and peering down at his laptop screen. He figured it was about time to catch up on any news about the fire they'd started back at the university.

The article was still trending on the KU website, and plenty of pictures of the ashy ruins seemed to have been posted on the KU instagram page. There was nothing said about him and Lucifer on the college website, but when Sam searched for articles from the local news stations and newspapers, one phrase seemed to be repeated quite often: " _Police have spoken to the professor of the classroom in question, who wishes to remain unnamed. Information from him has brought several suspects to light, but no progress on the case has been released to the press._ "

"They're not allowed to tell the press because they don't want to let us know that they're onto us," Sam said out loud, sitting up a little straighter and continuing to scroll through the article instead of looking at Lucifer. "But we've got to be prime suspects. All our fingerprints in the room would have been burned away by the fire, but... we left the campus right after. So. S'a good thing they haven't put our faces up yet."

Lucifer crawled over on the cheap bed to read over Sam's shoulder. Sam could practically feel him getting bored with the news (which wasn't even really news) as Lucifer slinked off again and lay down beside him, his head at Sam's knees.

"You know—speaking of that. I've been thinking," he said pensively. This more than likely wasn't going to be good in the general sense of the word. "I don't like our car. It's just too...  _un-criminal-like_. I mean, no one expects people like us when they look at a coupe. If we were to ever have a movie made about us, they would have to change that detail because our car is a fucking  _coupe_."

The extent to which Lucifer was distressed about this was amusing, and Sam grinned down at him as he pushed the laptop away.

"Isn't that the point, though? So we're unsuspecting?"

"It's not worth being unsuspecting if we've got a car that gives the impression of soccer mom and doesn't even have enough room to fuck in the backseat," Lucifer pouted, pulling himself up to a sitting position by Sam's arm. Rather than kissing him on the mouth like Sam expected, though, he took Sam's hand pressed his lips to the scarred initials on it and then intertwined their fingers so that their individual scars were pressed together.

Deciding to return the gesture, Sam pulled Lucifer's knuckles to his lips and grinned into them. "Okay. Let's steal a car."

* * *

It was several days before Lucifer saw a car that he liked and in a situation that worked for them. Sam agreed on it almost immediately—a dark red convertible that wasn't quite too new-looking, was most certainly criminal-ish but also didn't automatically identify them as criminals, and which had ample room in the backseat. The car (previously) belonged to a man who seemed to be a CEO of some corporation—Richard Roman, as it said on his driver's license.

He didn't seem to be an exceptionally strong man, so Sam and Lucifer were able to take him on no problem. Well, it was more like Lucifer distracted the CEO when he headed out to his car late at night, and Sam was given the chance to come up from behind and snap his neck. They got the keys out of the man's pocket and stuffed his limp body into the backseat as quickly as they could, and then drove straight to the lake where they had parked their coupe before so they could switch the license plates and move everything from the coupe to the BMW convertible.

Continuously making sure that no one was around, Lucifer took everything valuable off of the CEO and then put him into the front seat of the coupe, put the car into drive, and let it roll directly into the lake.

"I feel like it would have been a lot less tedious to let him live," Lucifer said, watching the car until it sank completely under the water.

"Yeah, but then he would have immediately reported his car stolen and that would be several hours lost on us," Sam reminded him, finding it funny that Lucifer only really cared about how much work that had been.

"I know," Lucifer sighed. "He seemed like the kind of guy who deserved it, anyway. And we got money out of it." The majority of which they couldn't even use because it wasn't in cash, but a lot nevertheless.

When there were no more bubbles from the coupe on the surface of the lake, Sam threw his arm around Lucifer's waist and walked them back to their new car so they could hurry up and get out of Illinois.

* * *

It came to Lucifer's decision within the month that they were barely criminals yet. He was clearly disappointed with the lack of actual risk they were taking (if you could really call it a  _lack_ ) in merely daily theft, a single murder, and driving a stolen car. All the while on the run from the law due to committing a serious case of arson.

"I love being separate from society, but... I still want us to be  _known_ , you know what I mean?" said Lucifer quietly, leaning back in his seat and folding his arms. The way that the light hit him without the roof of the car to block it made Sam want to touch him, but he could only glance over with a questioning look while he drove.

"I want to inspire terror wherever we go without people knowing our faces or our names," he went on. "They'll only know our actions, and on some level, even if we didn't affect them directly, they'll be  _afraid_."

After a few moments of silence and staring at the road, Sam nodded in understanding. He inhaled the feeling that Lucifer was emanating and, with that alone, told him that he agreed.

"People should always be afraid of us," Sam found himself saying, and Lucifer nodded as well.

"They always are."

God, that was too true.

Sam didn't hear another word out of Lucifer for several hours while he thought in silence, presumably of what to do about this  _inspiring terror_ thing. He seemed a bit loose from himself for a day or so until, as they were drifting down a country road, he abruptly told Sam to stop the car.

"Right here?"

"Not too close to that church up ahead—yeah, here's good."

Lucifer was shifting to get on his knees in the seat before they had even come to a full stop, and he propped himself up with his hands on the door of the car to stare down the church up ahead for several seconds. Sam's eyes darted between his lover—soulmate— _Devil_ —and the sign in front of the relatively small, country church.

_Homosexuals will not reach Heaven until they accept Christ,_  it said. And it really didn't bother Sam much because the opinions of others didn't get to him, but he still hated that most of the South still had those opinions.

"What are you thinking?" Sam asked, turning to Lucifer, who was unfolding his legs and sitting back down properly.

"I want to burn it down."

Sam knew that " _it_ " meant more than just this one little chapel—Lucifer's expression told him that he had meant it as in  _the_  Church. All of it. He wanted to destroy every last building that was centered around the business of worship and the people that ran them. And Sam was right there with him.

They had set a few fires here and there on the road so far, but nothing that required more than a lighter, or that couldn't have easily been put out. So Sam kicked the car into gear and drove them straight into town to buy a couple tanks of lighter fluid and a few lighters and boxes of matches for each of them, and he bought a pack of hotdogs, too, just to erase any suspicion and make it seem like they were only barbecuing.

Lucifer grinned widely and pulled him into a long kiss as soon as they parked back at the church, and Sam wasn't sure how long they were kissing before they finally got out of the car and grabbed the lighter fluid. There didn't seem to be anyone around, so they had no worries of getting caught, but as a precaution they still made an effort to walk quietly and carefully check inside the windows first.

And then came the lighter fluid around every wall outside the church. Sam let Lucifer do the honor of lighting a match and tossing it into the line of fluid, and they both remained standing there only long enough to see the flames flare up for one second. Once they were back at the car, though, Lucifer held Sam back from getting in right away and stood there watching until the first pillar fell down completely. Then Sam hopped over the door of the convertible and waited for the other man to get in before he stepped on the gas.

With the ashes of the first church they burnt down trailing in the dust behind them, Lucifer took a long breath as if to inhale the scent of the hallowed ground being engulfed in flame.

"Terror is only justice," he said from the passenger seat, his eyes on the road and his lips pursed. "Prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue."

Sam glanced over in a moment of curiosity and amusement: For that moment he seemed to forget what they'd just done and instead felt distinctly impressed that Lucifer knew that quote by heart.

"Robespierre."

"Yes."

Smirking, he turned his eyes back to the road and briefly let them wander to the church blazing far away in the rear-view mirror.

"So this is for some kind of justice?" Sam said, his guess nearly lost as it tumbled away in the wind and the rumble of the engine. "Or are you planning a sort of second French Revolution?"

A matching smirk quirked on the edge of Lucifer's lips, and it seemed for a split second to be a full grin in Sam's peripheral vision.

"Nah, I just like the quote. And I like setting things I don't like on fire."

* * *

Sam found it ironic that serial arson became the thing that they did, considering that it had been fire that had killed both his mother and his first serious girlfriend. But it was more funny to him than anything, since he couldn't find a shred of remorse in himself anymore.

Over the next year or so, they continued like that. They got their living by stealing, they cleverly avoided the law by switching out license plates, they got their kicks by risking getting caught having sex in almost-public places, and they just kept driving with nowhere and everywhere to go. Everywhere but Kansas, at least, because they agreed that it was a bad idea to go back there at all.

And they set fire to nearly every country church they came across.

It took about nine church-fires for the media to recognize that America was currently being "terrorized by serial arsonists." Sam and Lucifer laughed and nearly cheered the first time they turned on a motel television and saw the remains of their last church being covered by a reporter on the news.

"I wonder if anyone thinks that it's us, yet," said Sam when the news story was over, starting to flip through channels.

"Nah, I wouldn't peg the Lawrence police as smart enough to make a connection," Lucifer told him in a voice that implied his mind was already focused on much different things—and he proved that when his arms snaked around Sam's chest from the back and pressed his mouth to his neck.

* * *

Because they were finally wanted for real, they decided (somewhat disappointingly) to turn their route around entirely and wait until they had crossed at least three state lines before starting back up with the fires again. It wasn't exactly difficult to keep police and FBI off their trail when they zigzagged so much that there was barely even a trail to follow. As always, the risk was worth it, anyways.

And as much as the rest of the country would like to have thought otherwise, there  _was_  generally a method to their madness. Lucifer always checked inside and around the churches first, to make sure there were no children inside-and if there were, they either waited until the children were gone to do it or moved on without sending the church up in flames at all.

When Sam asked him why he cared, Lucifer told him, "They're only in church because they're forced to. And they're too young to really be part of society yet. So they don't deserve to die."

He hadn't really thought about it much before, but now he realized that Lucifer only ever hurt people because he thought they deserved it. Sam didn't mind much either way, but it was still a pretty endearing trait to find in him.

After choosing their church and making sure there was virtually no way for them to get caught, they would always replicate their first church fire and get lighter fluid all the way around the building, throw the match in, and immediately get the Hell out of there. And it got to the point that it was a routine for Sam to kiss Lucifer long enough for him to put the car into drive, and then put his right arm over the back of the passenger seat while they rode away and became dust in the wind.

Oftentimes in the bouts of silence that followed a church fire, Sam thought about how Lucifer had told him he was a psychopath, and he wondered if an actual psychiatrist would have told him that as well. He would laugh inwardly and smirk at the thought of going into a psychiatrist's office and telling them, "I burn down churches and occasionally kill people for fun. Does that makes me a psychopath?", and then would always figure that labels didn't matter.

Though he did appreciate the one he had for Lucifer. He always had his Devil riding shotgun, and that was a comfort to know. It made Sam feel safe and whole.

* * *

Some months in (five? six? Sam honestly wasn't sure), they witnessed a woman get pretty much assaulted in a bar by a street thug, and all it took was a mutual look between them for Sam and Lucifer to decide to follow the guy out of the bar and kill him n the alley. It was how they finally got a gun, and it was what led them to continue with the occasional murder with the reasoning of " _They deserved it_ " rather than _only_  to steal money off of their corpse.

So it seemed that they were stepping up their game from serial arsonists to serial  _arsonists/killers_. There wasn't much of a pattern to connect the victims other than that they were all deplorable people (some of which Lucifer judged merely by looking at them, as he claimed that he could just  _tell_  they deserved it), though, and on the outside they had nothing to do with the fires, so the killings weren't attributed to them in the news. They weren't even counted as serial killings as far as they could tell.

But Sam knew how much police were supposed to keep away from the press, so he knew how likely it was that they did, indeed, have a trail. It was a miracle every night that the door of their motel room wasn't busted down, and every time that they walked into a diner and weren't recognized and the police weren't immediately called. And because they were both so aware of how lucky they were to still be out of the law's grasp, most of their murders, at least, were celebrated with passionate sex in the backseat of the car and as many "I love you"s as they could possibly work into one night.

With the roof pulled up, of course.

* * *

There was only one church that Sam ever hesitated to set fire to.

"What's the matter?" Lucifer asked him softly when he remained where he stood rather than approaching the church in front of them.

"I just—I don't know," Sam said, rooted to the spot and not really sure why. "I think... I've been here before. I just can't put my finger on it."

His curiosity had him walking around—not to check the inside, but to see if he could remember anything from looking at the outside. It wasn't until he reached the small cemetery on the other side that he realized.

"Ilchester, Maryland," he whispered to himself, frowning and weaving his way through the tombstones without really thinking. Lucifer followed him, and placed a hand on his back when he stopped in front of what was probably the newest grave at this church.

" _Ruby Cortese_ ," Lucifer read, letting out a breath. "Wasn't that... your last girlfriend? The one who got you on drugs?" There was a note of bitterness in his voice. Sam just nodded. "...Do you feel bad about setting this place on fire, with her here?"

Sam was silent for a moment, and then shook his head and turned away from the tombstone. "No, not really," he said in complete honesty. "It's just... weird. To see this place again. In fact—I want to burn it down more, now. Get rid of her completely, you know?."

The church was empty, and it was far enough out that it was fairly easy to set ablaze without fearing much at all for their freedom. Once they were back in the car and driving away, Lucifer briefly touched Sam's face and said, "I should show you my mom's grave sometime."

Sam put his arm over the back of the passenger seat and let his mouth twitch into a small smile. He refrained from looking into the rear-view mirror until the church was out of sight.

* * *

August of 2012, one of Lucifer's fires went wrong.

Of course, all of his fires were inherently  _wrong_ , especially considering that oftentimes people didn't come out alive from them, but in this one it was the one who pulled the trigger that ended up getting shot.

Sam wasn't there when it happened. Then, he'd supposed Lucifer had gotten impatient about the church they'd been waiting out and hadn't wanted to bother him while he was asleep. Looking back on it years later, though, he always wondered if it had been on purpose. If Lucifer had decided he was too much of a burden on Sam, or if he felt he deserved what he was giving himself. Or if this had just been an extraordinarily cruel way to torture him.

_Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so what better way to keep you loving me than to kill myself?_

It was so easy to imagine him saying that. It was certainly something Lucifer would say. He was a regular Edgar Allen Poe when he wanted to be.

Or he had been.

Or—no, he still was. Because Sam still heard Lucifer in his head, singing off-key and saying seemingly irrelevant but profoundly deep things, and sometimes even insinuating that perhaps Sam should commit suicide himself, to make it all more romantic. He heard him saying things like _That looks like a good church to burn down. You know the preachers there are liars and pedophiles, anyway—they deserve it,_  and  _Why don't you go murder someone who deserves it, it'll make you feel better._

Even now, Lucifer was still the little Devil on his shoulder. He still seemed to be riding shotgun wherever he— _they_ —went.

Sam still woke up from nightmares of seeing Luc's face surrounded by flames, charred and burnt, and in some places looking like it was just melting off. And his  _eyes_. Just. They were always right there in front of him, no matter how hard Sam tried to blink them away. The worst thing was that they didn't look any different than they had when Lucifer was alive.

He would wake to the sound of sirens and the re-happening of panic from when he hoisted Lucifer's body over his shoulder and got him far away from the church before anyone else managed to get there, and the searing hot feeling of Lucifer's melted skin sticking to his clothes.

He would remember crying and screaming and hitting everything in sight until his knuckles bled, and sometimes he still stopped their car in a secluded place to do just that all over again. The image of Lucifer's body going up in flames for good on the pyre that Sam felt was best to honor him was burnt into his mind forever, and he didn't want it to go away. He didn't want to forget him at all.

Sam never looked for news of how many other people happened to die in the church-fire Lucifer had set or if the police finally had a lead to go after for the serial arson or had any idea that a body was missing from that fire. He just kept driving. Sometimes he listened to the new permanent voice in his head and set fires and killed people on his own, and it was those acts that kept him grounded because he figured they would make sure that he was going to the same place Lucifer was, if Heaven and Hell were real. And he had no hopes (or wants) of his voice of reason ever coming back.

He still changed the license plate on a very non-schedule schedule, and he still didn't see the point in getting a phone because no one was going to call him, anyway. Dean was always vague in the back of his mind, but the idea of showing up on his doorstep, no longer in college and now wanted by the law for serial arson, just seemed impossible. But of course he'd accepted that going back to his old life was impossible long ago.

And so Sam just kept driving. He would squint at the sun and at the vial of Lucifer's ashes hanging from the rear-view mirror, and then at the permanent scar on his hand—and after he turned the key into the ignition, he would put his right arm over the back of the passenger seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with this story and left feedback, and if you could leave just one last comment telling me what you thought of the story as a whole, that would be great. 
> 
> I've gotten so attached to this story and I'm so sad that it's finally over, and I hope a lot of you feel the same.
> 
> I plan on writing more Supernatural fics in the future, so stay tuned.


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